The World History Association’s 34th Annual Meeting will be held in Louisville, Kentucky in the United States with the theme "Protest, Prohibition, and Pugilism: Louisville and the World." The rich history of Louisville places it firmly within the interactions, migrations, and networks that have formed the modern world, and the forces that have shaped Louisville have been globally resonant throughout human history as well.

With "Protest," we highlight race and resistance as themes in world history. Our conference venue, the Seelbach Hotel, is located on 4th Street, the location of several key events in Louisville civil rights history. Louisville also evokes the global history of racialized state violence, since it is the site of the 2020 police murder of Breonna Taylor and the outpouring of political action that emerged as a response.

With "Prohibition," we evoke the global history of foods and intoxicants, their economic and cultural significance, and the attempts of states and other actors to limit or shape their consumption. We invite participants to focus on Louisville's role as a production center for bourbon, one of the city’s largest historical and contemporary exports, and the ways that Louisville’s economy and culture have followed the booms and busts of prohibition and global commercialization of “Kentucky Nectar.” The city’s culture grew around home distillers, corporations, and at times an active underground bootleg community. Likewise, hemp was an important industrial product in Kentucky throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. However, the shifting legal status of hemp since the 1970s has had an impact on agricultural workers.

“Prohibition” evokes global histories of labor and regulation in other ways as well. Historically an active riverport linked to the Atlantic world, Louisville is today a global center of logistics and transportation, thanks in part to the presence of UPS Worldport. As in every generation, workers are at the heart of trade and economic power. Many of them are immigrants, and some were historically unfree, like the enslaved peoples who once labored in homes, warehouses, factories, and riverfront docks.

With "Pugilism," we invite participants to explore global sports history and human-equine relationships as themes in world history. The famous boxer and political figure Muhammad Ali is a Louisville native whose skill and global activism were both forged in the city. Louisville also produces Louisville Slugger bats, the most famous baseball equipment in the world. Finally, it is one of the global homes of horse racing culture, with the Kentucky Derby held every year since 1875 at the Churchill Downs racetrack.

Louisville lies on the ancestral lands of the Shawandasse Tula, the Osage, the Kaskaskia, the Adena Culture, the Hopewell Culture, and the Myaamia.

All papers which approach history from a transnational and global perspective are welcome, but Louisville offers a diverse range of topics to consider, and applicants are encouraged to center or connect their proposal to one or more of these themes.

The World History Association encourages proposals for sessions and papers presenting original research and pedagogical techniques within the overarching themes of Protest, Prohibition, and Pugilism, as well as other topics of interest to world historians. We welcome topics involving the widest possible range of geographic locales and historical time periods.