In March 2022, the American Historical Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a Sharp Grant to Sustain and Advance the Work of Historical Organizations to the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS) to support the creation of a series of audio documentaries and accompanying websites about four important events in U.S. and Latin American history. The subjects of the documentaries varied widely across time and space, from the 1947 Mendez vs. Westminster School District of Orange County court case about school desegregation in the United States, to the 1952 Revolution in Bolivia, to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. A team of historians who already had experience producing SECOLAS’s podcast Historias spent the rest of 2022 creating the audio documentaries, working alongside graduate students from their institutions to record interviews, collect audio and visual primary sources, and weave together all the pieces into documentaries and educational websites.

This practicum brings together the SECOLAS team of producers to reflect on their experiences and offer lessons to other podcasting historians. The participants will share short examples of their documentaries, show their websites, and discuss practical and intellectual issues. Topics of discussion will include design and storytelling, teambuilding and organization, and editing and post-production. The participants will also address wider questions including: What sets an audio documentary apart from other podcasts about history? What are the challenges of creating an audio documentary? What are the benefits of audio documentaries for historians, teachers, and the public? What kind of websites work best to accompany and enrich audio documentaries? How can we use audio documentaries and podcasts to get students involved in the field of history, both as producers and audiences? How do we ensure that our work as historians reaches a wide public audience?

By holding a practicum session at the AHA meeting, the SECOLAS Historias podcast producers hope to extend the benefits of the AHA-NEH funding beyond our four documentaries by sharing what we have learned with other public-facing historians. Just like creating other forms of historical production, producing podcasts and audio documentaries is an art that draws on skills, practices, and experiences that can be taught to other practitioners. The annual AHA meeting offers an ideal opportunity for us to share our experience with the wider historical community.