The 2000 OAH annual meeting in St. Louis is the joint project of the OAH, National Council on Public History (NCPH) and Missouri Conference on History (MCH). A Program Committee with representatives from all three organizations worked to ensure that panels on the 2000 program addressed both public history concerns and the local setting of St. Louis and Missouri, as well as the conference theme of The U.S. and the Wider World. Public history is prominently featured on this year's program. Two pre-conference workshops sponsored by NCPH focus on historic preservation; sessions spread over the four-day conference deal with relationships among public, academy, museums, and local historical agencies. Participants will have an opportunity to consider diverse dimensions of the practice of public history, including patent research, the Lincoln legal papers, and "Realities and Possibilities of Public Spending on History." They will also hear panels that address broad issues in the field, including "Improving Communication between the Academy and the Public," "Educating Women and Minorities for Public History Leadership" or "News from the Front: Women's History Museums."

The 2000 program will make special use of our local setting in the St. Louis region. There will be three tours on Thursday, March, 30: an Underground Railroad bus tour from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon; a walking tour of downtown St. Louis from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m.; and a tour of the Eads Bridge and Laclede's Landing from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. On Friday, March 31, from 11:30 am. to 3:00 p.m., following the session "Cahokia in American History," there will be a tour of the Cahokia Mounds Historic Site, the pre-Columbia metropolis located in modern-day East St. Louis. On Saturday, April 1, there will be two additional tours, one by bus from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. of Civil War St. Louis, following the session, "Ulysses S. Grant's Whitehaven Farm: Interpreting a Site," and another by bus from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. of immigrant neighborhoods on the southside of the city. The Labor and Working-Class History Association is sponsoring a walking tour of St. Louis which will visit selected sites that explore the history of St. Louis workers' struggles to transform their workplace and society. The tour will be held on Friday, March 31, from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. Several sessions will be held at local sites of some historical or civic significance, including the Old Court, where the landmark Dred Scott case was initially heard; the Wainwright Building, which was the architect Louis Sullivan's first skyscraper; and the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame.

Please make special note of the following events. On Friday from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. the NCPH will sponsor its Endowment Campaign Fundraiser at the Morgan Street Brewery. This will be followed by the OAH Awards Presentation and President's Address at 7:30 in the Adam's Mark Hotel. OAH President David Montgomery has chosen for his talk "Immigrants and the Shaping of American Public Life." Finally, on Saturday, April 1, at 7:00 p.m. the Missouri Historical Society will sponsor a reception at its newly expanded Missouri Historical Museum in Forest Park. The Society invites convention goes to enjoy hors d'oerves, visit its exhibition "Seeking St. Louis," and listen to the music of the St. Louis Rhythm and All Stars Band. Assembled for this event, the band features rhythm and blues legends Oliver Spain, Clayton Love, and Jacqui Stanti, who since the l950s have helped define the sounds of St. Louis and Memphis soul music.

This year's plenary sessions address the conference's theme of The U.S. and the Wider World, or our St. Louis site. Scheduled for March 30, from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m., and co-sponsored by the OAH and MCH, "Prince of Darkness: Culture and Controversy in the Musical Career of Miles Davis" brings together Lewis Ehrenberg, Darlene Clark-Hine, Scott DeVaux, Gerald Early, Robert McMichael, and Eric Porter to discuss the importance of St. Louis native Miles Davis to the development of American jazz. A second plenary on March 31 from 9:00 to 11:00 am., titled, "Intimacies of Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Gender and Colonialism" draws on the expertise of Linda Gordon, Peggy Pascoe, Vince Rafael, Ann Laura Stoler, and Ramon Gutierrez. Finally, William H. O'Neill, Andrew J. Butrica, Elliot R. Barkan, Paul N. Edwards, and R.E.G. Davies will join Moderator Pamela Walker Laird to discuss "Communication and Transportation Networks as Keys to Global History" in a third (roundtable) plenary session on April 1 from 9:00 to 11:00 am. Historical approaches that have long encouraged exploration of international, transnational and comparative perspectives--notably studies of the Atlantic World, borderland regions, migration, the military, empire-building, internationalism, and diplomacy--are particularly well represented on this year's program. Participants can hear discussions of "African Americans in the Atlantic World" and "Forging Collective Identities through Stories in the Atlantic World." Keeping with the conference's attention to popular culture in a global context, they can attend a session of "Popular Music in the U.S.--Mexico Borderlands." Panels focusing on empire, imperialism, and warfare are particularly diverse in method and approach. Panels on empire include "Imperial Anxiety and Anti-Imperial Imaginings" and on "Empire and Indigenous Peoples: the Seventeenth Century." For those interested in warfare and national security, panels include "War and Society: Ideology and Internationalism in the 1960s," "New Perspectives on U.S. National Security" and--linking to our public history theme--"Memories of Military Engagement." Varieties of linkages between the government and peoples of the U.S. and the wider world also bring together historians of politics, society and culture. Among sessions that examine migration, participants will find on the program "Comparative Perspectives on Immigration and Ethnic/Race Relations in the U.S.," "Race Labor and the Transnationl Experience of Caribbean Migration, and a roundtable on "Migration, Ethnicity and Transnationalism." A panel on "U.S. Women's Internationalism" explores international relations from the perspective of social and intellectual history, while "U.S. Foreign Relations, 1940-1960," summarizes a rich historiographical tradition.

Film, too, has found its place on this year's program. It provides a particularly engaging medium for exploring the conference theme of the U.S. and the Wider World. Discussion of "They were not Silent: The Jewish Labor Movement Responds to Nazism and the Holocaust" will follow a showing of the film. The video "Step by Step: Building a Feminist Movement, 1941-1977," will provide the basis of a discussion about the origins on modern feminism. In addition, a regular panel of scholarly papers and commentary focuses on the theme of "Hollywood and Hungary: Cinematic Relationships."

Again this year, the Focus on Teaching Day activities on Saturday, Apr. 1, complements and expands OAH panels that address teaching issues of special relevance to this year's conference theme of "the Wider World." A panel on "Classroom Strategies" in Asian-American Studies focuses on connecting the history of the U.S. to other parts of the world. Another panel ("Beyond Their Borders") directly addresses the conference theme by bringing together Americanists whose teaching responsibilities include World Surveys. Participants will find a rich selection of panels focusing on the use of electronic media in the classroom, including "The Electronic History Classroom." Two H-Net sponsored sessions "Best Practices in American History of the WWW" and "Resource Inequality and the Internet" explore how technology affects the internationalization of Americanists' teaching and research. Panels on the work of individual scholars or on books that have particularly enriched recent historiography are a long-standing tradition at the OAH annual conference. This year, sessions are a particularly diverse group that address issues of domestic and international politics, culture, and gender. Participants will find on the program a panel on Richard Rorty's Achieving our Country, a second on Laud Humphrey's Tea Room Trade, and a third on "The Legacies of William Appleman Williams."

As for St. Louis's other attractions for historians, those who have grown accustomed to thinking of history exhibitions as Colonial Era artifacts and restorations are in for a refreshing change of pace. The city's remarkably rich menu of pre-Columbian and nineteenth-century sites can be viewed from the walking tours and bus tours listed above. Walkers may also wish to view the city's famous Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (and Museum), also known as The Arch, a few blocks from the convention hotel. Farther away but still within walking distance are the Old Cathedral (l834), City Hall (l891) and Union Station (l893), as well as the homestead of the African American composer ScottJoplin. St. Louis's Little Italy (The Hill) and, just south of downtown, the nineteenth-century Budweiser complex of Anheuser-Busch brewers, are both worth seeing, according to a recent New York Times travel writer in a headline about tourism in St. Louis, "The River Runs By it, History Through It."