Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society

Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society Phi Alpha Theta is the National History Honor Society for Colleges and Universities.

Phi Alpha Theta, founded in 1921, is the National History Honor Society for Four Year Colleges and Universities. Our mission is to promote the study of history through the encouragement of research, good teaching, publication and the exchange of learning and ideas among students and teachers of History.

Calling all student historians! The Welebaethan: A Journal of History at Cal State Fullerton is accepting submissions fo...
09/01/2026

Calling all student historians! The Welebaethan: A Journal of History at Cal State Fullerton is accepting submissions for their next issue, and we wanted our members to know about it. They're looking for scholarly articles and essays (including article-length theses), plus reviews of books, exhibitions, films, and games of interest to historians.

The deadline is Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at noon PDT. CSUF students can submit directly, and students from other institutions can too, as long as a faculty member sends a brief letter of recommendation straight to the journal by the deadline. Full guidelines are at welebaethan.org/submissions.

Know a student sitting on a paper that deserves a wider audience? Tag them below!

Two hundred and twelve years ago today, the White House was burning.On August 24, 1814, British troops marched into Wash...
08/24/2026

Two hundred and twelve years ago today, the White House was burning.

On August 24, 1814, British troops marched into Washington and set fire to the Capitol, the Treasury, and the President's House. The story most of us learned in school centers on First Lady Dolley Madison, who refused to leave until Gilbert Stuart's life-size portrait of George Washington was safely out of the building.

It's a great story. It's also incomplete.

The people who actually did the physical work of unscrewing the massive frame from the wall and getting the canvas out the door were White House steward Jean Pierre Sioussat, gardener Thomas McGrath, and Paul Jennings, an enslaved man who worked in the household and later became the first person to publish a memoir of life inside the White House. Jennings' own account, written decades afterward, is one of the only firsthand records of what actually happened that day, and it gives credit to the people who did the lifting.

None of this makes Dolley Madison's role less real. She was the one who insisted the portrait be saved and stayed in a house under threat to make sure it happened. But the fuller version, the one with more names in it, is simply better history than the version with just one.

What's a story from your own research where the popular version left someone important out?

Nashville, get ready. Our 2027 Biennial Convention lands at the Sheraton Grand Nashville Downtown, January 6–8, and the ...
08/14/2026

Nashville, get ready. Our 2027 Biennial Convention lands at the Sheraton Grand Nashville Downtown, January 6–8, and the theme says it all: History in the Heartland. Three days of paper presentations, chapter reunions, and celebrating the research you've been working on all year. We're already looking forward to Music City in January (turns out it's a great time to visit). Registration details are coming soon.

Who's already planning their trip?

Here's a fact that surprises almost everyone: the Statue of Liberty's foundation went into the ground two full years bef...
08/05/2026

Here's a fact that surprises almost everyone: the Statue of Liberty's foundation went into the ground two full years before the statue herself ever set foot (well, torch) in New York Harbor.

On August 5, 1884, in a downpour so heavy it kept away half the invited guests, the cornerstone for Lady Liberty's pedestal was laid on what was then called Bedloe's Island. About 1,500 people showed up anyway, roughly a third of them French. The statue itself was still being assembled in Paris. It wouldn't arrive, dismantled into 350 crated pieces, for another year.

The pedestal almost didn't get built at all. Congress refused to fund it, New York's governor vetoed state money for it, and it took a public fundraising campaign (Joseph Pulitzer among those leading it) to finish the job in time.

We love this one because it's a reminder that the monuments we take for granted usually have a messier, more human backstory than the postcard version. What's a landmark near you with a surprising origin story like this one? Tell us in the comments.

People sometimes talk about history like it's a closed book. All the facts settled, nothing left to find. We'd push back...
07/29/2026

People sometimes talk about history like it's a closed book. All the facts settled, nothing left to find. We'd push back on that a little.

The past doesn't change, sure. But our understanding of it shifts all the time. A box of letters turns up in an attic. An archive gets digitized, and suddenly a scholar in Ohio can read a document that used to sit locked in one building an ocean away. Someone asks a question nobody thought to ask before. And the story we all thought we knew gets a little truer.

That's the part we love around here. History isn't a monument you visit. It's a conversation that's still going.

When's the last time something you read made you rethink a piece of history you thought was settled?

A gentle nudge for our faculty advisors: fall is closer than it looks, and the chapters that start strong are usually th...
07/27/2026

A gentle nudge for our faculty advisors: fall is closer than it looks, and the chapters that start strong are usually the ones already thinking about it now.

The first induction, that first meeting, a guest lecture, a research night, the small welcome that makes a nervous sophomore feel like they actually belong. None of it has to be elaborate. It just helps to start early.

So we'll ask: what's the first thing your chapter does each fall to bring new members in? Share it below. Somebody else reading this probably needs exactly that idea.

If you studied history, you've heard the question at least a hundred times: "so what are you going to do with that?"Here...
07/24/2026

If you studied history, you've heard the question at least a hundred times: "so what are you going to do with that?"

Here's the answer we wish more people led with. You learn to read critically when the clock's running. To build a case from evidence and defend it to people who disagree. To find the one thread that matters in a pile of conflicting sources. To write clearly enough to change someone's mind. To tell a claim from a fact.

Every employer we know says they're desperate for exactly those skills. Historians spend years building them. With a new school year almost here, that's worth saying out loud, especially to the students in your life who are still deciding.

We'll just say it: we're already excited about Nashville.The Phi Alpha Theta Biennial Convention, "History in the Heartl...
07/22/2026

We'll just say it: we're already excited about Nashville.

The Phi Alpha Theta Biennial Convention, "History in the Heartland," brings members from more than 1000 chapters to the Sheraton Grand Nashville Downtown, January 6 through 8, 2027. Three days of scholarship, good conversation, and a city that knows a thing or two about telling a story.

Registration is open now, and the Call for Papers closes November 13. If January feels far away, trust us, it arrives fast once the fall semester starts.

All the details are here: phialphatheta.org/2027-phi-alpha-theta-biennial

Fifty-seven years ago today, on July 20, 1969, two people set foot on the Moon while a third circled overhead and someth...
07/20/2026

Fifty-seven years ago today, on July 20, 1969, two people set foot on the Moon while a third circled overhead and something like 600 million people down here watched it happen.

What gets us about it is the timing. It's recent enough that your grandparents can probably tell you exactly where they were, and far enough back that it now sits in the archives with everything else we study. That in-between space, close enough to feel and far enough to examine, is where some of the most interesting history lives.

Here's what we keep wondering: what moment from your own lifetime do you think historians will still be picking apart 200 years from now?

On the morning of July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr and former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton faced off wi...
07/12/2026

On the morning of July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr and former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton faced off with pistols on a ledge above the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton was hit in the abdomen. He was rowed back across the river to Manhattan, where he spent his final hours surrounded by his wife and several of their children. He died the next day, July 12, one of the most consequential deaths in early American politics.

The rivalry behind it had been building for over a decade: two brilliant, ambitious men who kept landing on opposite sides of the same fights, over a presidential election, a governor's race, and eventually just reputation itself. In the end it came down to one vague insult printed in a newspaper, and neither man would back down.

Hamilton's death effectively ended the Federalist Party he'd helped build. Burr was indicted for murder in two states, never stood trial, and spent the rest of his life as a political outcast. Neither man really came out ahead.

It's a good reminder that some of history's biggest turning points come down to very small, very human moments of pride.

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