Common Effort for the Future of History

Lee W. Formwalt

My recent travels have reinforced for me just how critical it is for the OAH to bring together all practitioners of American history both in and outside the academy. In Boston, three OAH staff members met with several historians, including the Massachusetts co-chairs on the OAH Membership Committee, to discuss the situation of precollegiate teachers in New England. I went into that conversation hoping to learn something of the state of the profession in the Northeast, the nature of collaboration between high school and college historians, and what OAH could do to help promote American history there. What I did not anticipate was the truly depressing and overwhelming account of life on the precollegiate front lines, especially at the elementary and middle school levels.

One of the things that struck me was how we regularly talk about precollegiate teachers from grades K (sometimes now, even pre-K) through 12, but we really mean high school teachers. We have largely neglected teachers who cover history in the elementary and middle school classrooms. Teachers at those levels need the expertise of college and university historians more than ever, particularly as states implement standards. Many of them have no history training. Meanwhile, our organization is known around the world for disseminating the finest American history scholarship through the Journal of American History, now under the able direction of editor Joanne Meyerowitz (see her interview on p. 3)

For fifteen years, the OAH has been making the most recent scholarship accessible to high school teachers through its Magazine of History, a teaching tool that college and university professors have also found very useful. Our colleagues in Massachusetts suggested that we should take the next step and make some portion of the Magazine of History accessible to middle and elementary school teachers. At the very least we can create a teaching page on our website and perhaps offer a session or more for elementary and middle school teachers at the annual meeting.

It would be fair to say that many of us at the college and university level know little about what is happening in precollegiate classroom teaching. Yet, it behooves us to learn quickly. Without high quality history teaching at the K-12 level, university historians may soon find themselves with fewer history majors to mentor. As Bruce A. Vansledright suggests, we can show elementary teachers and students that history is more than a collection of facts. College, university, and public historians need to demonstrate how we "do" history (see page 7). Some of us are already leading or participating in summer workshops and institutes designed to enrich K-12 history teaching.

I had the privilege of once again participating in the Fannie Lou Hamer Institute on Citizenship and Democracy, an outgrowth of the 1997 NEH Summer Institute on Teaching the History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. The Hamer Institute brings scholars from around the country together with high school teachers and students in the Jackson, Mississippi, area in an effort to enrich the social studies curriculum there. As a student of the Albany Movement, I was able to discuss with teachers how to enhance their students' understanding of the civil rights movement by using the Freedom Songs that capture so much of what the movement in the South was about. As a representative of OAH, I explained to them how the various thematic issues of the Magazine of History provide them with new and different ways to teach the past. Yet the institute was not just a one-way process. All of us on the institute faculty (movement participants, public historians and college and university professors alike) learned more about the high school classroom--both the struggles and the accomplishments. I was impressed once again by what the collaboration between precollegiate teachers and professional historians has been able to accomplish.

From Jackson, I flew to Houston where I spoke to my former colleagues on the Council of Historically Black Graduate Schools at their summer meeting. Our experience with the Adam's Mark earlier this year led the OAH to examine its own record on minority membership and it is clear that we have our work cut out for us. Currently, we have 210 African American members, only three percent of the total membership. More astonishing, less than a dozen of these members are at the more than one hundred historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Once again, collaboration can help both OAH and HBCUs. As more members from these institutions join OAH, the organization and all it does will reflect better the diversity of our society. At the same time, American historians at HBCUs will benefit from the access to scholarship and the connections to colleagues that membership in our national organization provides.

Our struggle to improve diversity in the OAH must also include efforts to bring in greater numbers of Latino/a, American Indian, Asian American, and gay and lesbian historians. At the same time we cannot neglect the concerns of our many colleagues who find themselves trying to negotiate the growing dependence on adjunct and part-time positions in colleges and universities around the country. In response, OAH is actively involved in the Coalition on the Academic Workforce. This summer, CAW members will analyze the data recently collected in an NEH-supported survey of history and other academic departments around the country. In the meantime, we have joined the AHA in a joint AHA-OAH committee on adjunct and part-time teaching. The leadership of both historical organizations has made this issue a priority.

As we prepare for our upcoming meetings in Ames and Los Angeles our collaborative efforts are very much front and center stage. Professional development was a priority for the Midwestern Regional Conference program committee, which planned a series of state-of-the-art sessions throughout the meeting. Here historians at all levels will be updated on the last twenty years of historiography in various fields of American history. Traditional sessions on different aspects of Midwestern history will present the latest scholarship in this field. Public historians from historical societies, government, and other venues will also participate and share their experiences as professionals outside the academy.

Another group of American historians underrepresented in OAH are those who practice in community colleges and other two-year institutions. More college students take the American history survey course in two-year colleges than in any other institutions of higher education. Yet American historians at community colleges comprise a mere five percent of OAH membership. OAH has recognized the value and importance of community college historians, recently publishing Community College Historians in the United States, but we have a long way to go. As we prepare for our annual meeting in Los Angeles, we will make an extra effort to encourage community college historians, particularly those in the extensive California community college system, to join OAH and attend the annual meeting next April.

We all benefit from the various kinds of expertise we bring to the table. As university researchers learn more about the state of history in the K-12 classrooms and as precollegiate teachers develop a better understanding of the past through their connection with university professors and public historians, we will all be better prepared to combat the growing historical illiteracy in our society.

This historical illiteracy, highlighted in a recent survey taken for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, has grabbed Congress's attention. As we go to press, we learn that the U.S. Senate has just approved, 98-0, Robert Byrd's appropriation bill amendment providing $50 million "to develop, implement, and strengthen programs that teach American history (not social studies) as a separate subject within school curricula." Already in Massachusetts the effort is underway to replace social studies in the precollegiate curriculum with history.

As more precollegiate teachers look to professional historians for help, it is imperative that the OAH, as the professional organization and the learned society for American historians, welcomes all practitioners of the discipline into the fold. Together we will be much more effective in helping all Americans--in and out of the classroom--gain a deeper understanding of their past.