Connections: Rethinking our Audiences

Michael H. Ebner
Chair, OAH 2001 Program Committee

In organizing the annual meeting, the program committee was informed by the opportunities of its location in Los Angeles and the longstanding commitment of Kenneth T. Jackson, OAH president, to engage audiences beyond the academy. The committee especially encouraged proposals reflecting a broad appreciation of the work of history. "Connections: Rethinking our Audiences" is the theme for the annual meeting in Los Angeles (26-29 April  2001).  The program encompasses more than 125 sessions and nearly 500 participants.  In a major innovation from past practice, the Focus on Teaching sessions--imaginatively organized by Kevin Byrne and the Committee on Teaching--have been integrated throughout the convention program.  This report is the first of two installments--another will appear in the February issue--previewing the program.

William R. Ferris, chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities, will be the keynote speaker on the evening of 26 April.  In a session presided over by Darlene Clark Hine, incoming president of the OAH, he will consider the theme of the convention and the challenges entailed for the membership of the association.  Responding to Ferris will be three past presidents of the OAH: Joyce Appleby; William H. Chafe; and Linda K. Kerber.

Several sessions have been organized with the express purpose of considering voices not traditionally heard at the annual meetings of learned societies.  These session are:

  • The Presidential Election of 2000: William E. Leuchtenburg, another past president of the OAH, will preside over this panel.  Participants include Susan Estrich, who managed the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis in 1988 and now teaches law and political science; Ariannna Huffington, the Los Angeles-based syndicated columnist and political commentator; and James T. Patterson, a distinguished political historian.
  • Past Time: Baseball as History: this session assays the recently-published book by the same name written by Jules Tygiel, who is best known as the acclaimed author of Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy.  The panel chaired by Donald E. Spivey, a historian of sport, assembles a very interesting mix (even the professional historians are playing unaccustomed positions, akin to introducing interleague play to the OAH):  Stanley I. Kutler, renown as a legal historian who has written extensively on Richard M. Nixon and Watergate; John Murrin, known primarily as historian of colonial America but who also writes on the history of sport; and Sharon Robinson, director of educational programming for Major League Baseball who is the daughter of Rachel and Jackie Robinson. Jules Tygiel will respond to the panelists.
  • The Contested Craft: Creating Historical Documentaries for Television:  Ric Burns will screen excerpts from his own productions as he reflects on the challenges he has encountered in making such series as New York, Coney Island, The Way West, and The Donner Party.   Joining this panel, chaired by Eric Monkkonen, will be Graeme Davison, one of Australia's preeminent historians who is in the forefront of the quest to reach broadened audiences, and Patricia Nelson Limerick, who has written extensively as well as provocatively on extending the historian's craft beyond the boundaries of the academy.

Closely related is an important session devoted to the principal medium--textbooks--by which generations of undergraduates initially encounter our discipline.

  • Writing our American History Survey Textbooks: In a roundtable chaired by James West Davidson, the senior authors of three highly regarded textbooks discuss what is entailed, and what has changed over the years, in the writing of the American history survey textbook.  The panelists are:  David M. Kennedy, Mary Beth Norton, and Edward L. Ayers.

Multiple sessions also have been organized about the writing of biographies, a favorite genre of general readers if sales statistics are an accurate indicator. Collectively these will raise questions sometimes slighted at recent annual scholarly meetings of professional historians.

  • Writing Biography:  This session, presided over by Lizabeth Cohen (who does not write biography but admires them), assembles a distinguished panel of biographers, each discussing their subjects as well as their craft. They are: Blanche Wiesen Cook on Eleanor Roosevelt; David Levering Lewis on W. E. B. DuBois; and Donald E. Worster on John Wesley Powell.
  • Writing Theodore Roosevelt Across the Generations: On the centennial of Theodore Roosevelt's ascent to the presidency, an imaginatively conceived panel chaired by John Milton Cooper (author of a dual biography of Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) assembles three biographers of Theodore Roosevelt.  Spanning forty years, they come together to assay their subject:  William H. Harbaugh (1961); H. W. Brands (1997); and Kathleen M. Dalton (forthcoming).
  • Elvis!  Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, who has a biography (but not of Elvis) to her list of credits, chairs this panel.  It features Joel Williamson, author of a soon-to-be-published biography of Elvis Presley.  Offering comments will be Kenneth T. Jackson, a native of Memphis and longtime admirer of The King, and Charles McGovern. Several sessions, continuing along a path of recent meetings of the OAH, are devoted to assessing the major works of prominent scholars.
  • A Conversation about Japanese American History: Judy Yung moderates a panel,  joining Roger Daniels and Gary Okihiro, which will convene at the Japanese American National Museum.
  • Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life: Arlene Lazarowitz chairs a panel that visits a recently published book that takes sharp issue with prevailing interpretations of its subject.  Leonard Dinnerstein and Michael Marrus will offer their assessments, to be followed by Peter Novick.
  • Kevin Starr's California in Review: A panel presided over by Gary B. Nash will consider this multi-volume history of California.  William Deverell and Virginia Scharff will offer their assessments, followed by comments from Kevin Starr.
  • Paradigm Shift Books--A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: A panel moderated by E. Anthony Rotundo will reconsider this much celebrated book.  Participants are: Patricia Cline Cohen; Mary Maples Dunn; and Marla Miller.  Laurel Thatcher Ulrich will comment.
  • Historians Who've Changed Our Thinking--Richard White: This session, chaired by Clyde A. Milner II, brings together four historians of the American West: Philip J. DeLoria, Karen R. Merrill, Walter Nugent, and Elliot West.  Their remarks will be followed by comments from Richard White.

Los Angeles's ascent as a national region during the twentieth century provided the program committee with an important opportunity--not fully represented at recent annual meetings--to reexamine the international history of the United States broadly defined.  The titles of several sessions merit particular mention.

  • The United States and the German
    Right, 1938-63
  • Bermuda Conference to the Geneva Conference
  • American History in Multi-National Perspective
  • Supermarket to the World: Food and Transnational Power
  • Perspectives on America's Pacific Century

Much has been made, of late, of the singularity of Los Angeles and Southern California as both space and place.  The program will plumb this history in its rich and multifaceted dimensions.  Session titles include:

  • Gender and Community Building: Los Angeles in the Postwar Period
  • Zoot Suits to Ramparts: Mexican-Americans and    LAPD in Film and Scholarship
  • Snapshots of Southern California
  • Hollywood Politics/Grassroot Politics: The Uses    of Anti-Communism
  • Hollywood's Postwar Representations of General Ethnic & Racial Identities
  • Creating Southern California Identities
  • The City of the Twentieth Century: Conceptualizing the History of Los Angeles

The diversity of American culture, of course, also is encapsulated in this region.  Again, the program committee was most fortunate to have an opportunity to include an array of sessions which take account of the transformed demography of the nation-state:

  • Race and Ideology in Exhibitions, Expositions,    and Advertising
  • Asian Americans in the Early Cold War Years
  • Recognizing Landmarks in School Desegregation
  • New Immigrants to America
  • The Civil Rights Era: Participants as Audiences
  • Narrating the Postwar City and African American Politics
  • Cultural Clashes in Paradise (Hawaii)
  • Perspectives on Asian-American History
  • Southwestern Native American Material Culture
  • Revisioning the African-American Freedom Struggle

The program committee makes particular note of two closely related sessions on the history of disabilities.  The topic has not received much--if any--attention at prior annual meetings of the OAH.  The session titles are:

  • Medical Repair and Social Redemption: Disabled    Children in the Twentieth Century
  • Opening Up Public Spaces: Work, Access, and    Disability in Modern America

While the programs committee claims no credit whatsoever for creating these two sessions--they were submitted, in tandem, through the established mechanism for receipt of proposals--we are especially appreciative to present them as the early fruit of important new research being conducted by scholars in this emergent subfield of historical scholarship.

Comments about the OAH program for 2001 are welcomed and should be directed to Michael Ebner at <ebner@lfc.edu>.

2001 OAH Annual Meeting Program Committee
Michael H. Ebner, Lake Forest Collge (chair); Carol O'Connor, Utah State University (co-chair); Lillie Johnson Edwards, Drew University; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Smith College; Russell Lewis, Chicago Historical Society; Robert J. McMahon, University of Florida; Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California; and David Vigilante, National Center for History in the Schools

2001 Special Events & Publicity Committee
Robert C. Ritchie, Huntington Library (chair); William Deverell, California Institute of Technology; Lynn Dumenil, Occidental College; Gloria E. Miranda, El Camino Community College; Eric Monkkonen, UCLA; and Mollie Selvin, Los Angeles Times

Committee on Teaching
Kevin B. Byrne, Gustavus Adolphus College, (chair); Charles Zappia, San Diego Mesa College; Peg K. Smith, St. Mary's High School (MD); James A. Percoco, West Springfield (VA) High School; and Patricia Limerick, University of Colorado (Executive Board Liaison).