News of the Organization

Adam's Mark Trial Moved to St. Louis

On 25 October a federal judge ordered the transfer of the legal case involving OAH and the Adam's Mark Hotel to the Eastern District of Missouri in St. Louis. The hotel's parent company, HBE Corp., had sued OAH on 8 August 2000 in Lincoln, Nebraska, where the organization has been incorporated since its founding as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association.
U.S. Magistrate Judge David L. Piester noted that Nebraska "has no real connection with this case" and rejected the hotel corporation's claim that it "cannot receive a fair trial in St. Louis." Since Missouri law would determine the dispute's outcome and the vast majority of witnesses and records are in St. Louis, "the interest of justice" favored the transfer.
"We are pleased with Judge Piester's ruling," said OAH Executive Director Lee W. Formwalt. "It seemed strange to us that a St. Louis-based corporation would file suit against us in Nebraska when we've been based in Indiana for thirty years."
The hotel had sued OAH for $100,000 in damages, claiming breach of contract. OAH responded in September by countersuing for $75,000 in costs incurred as a result of moving the March 2000 annual meeting from the hotel to the campus of Saint Louis University. OAH argued that Adam's Mark had an implied duty to cooperate in helping to make the 2000 annual meeting successful, yet instead the hotel had created an inhospitable environment that made it impossible for the organization's members to meet.
Several other national groups cancelled major events at Adam's Mark hotels in response to the Justice Department's investigation. These included the Episcopal Church, USA; the Human Rights Campaign; the National Football League; and the National Park Service. None of these organizations have been sued by the Adam's Mark/HBE Corp.
The dispute began last winter when the U.S. Justice Department, the NAACP, and the Florida Attorney General charged the nationwide hotel chain with civil rights violations. Despite evidence going back a decade that it tolerated racial discrimination, the chain vehemently fought the lawsuits and threatened legal action against any group cancelling a meeting because of the hotel's problems. One week before the OAH annual meeting, the Adam's Mark settled with all parties and agreed to pay $8 million dollars to the plaintiffs and to four historically black colleges and universities in Florida. An independent group, Project Equality, was appointed to monitor the hotel company to insure that it did not engage in any of the racially discriminatory practices of which it has been accused. In mid-October, a federal judge threw out the $8 million settlement, ruling that it was invalidated by recent U.S. Supreme Court and a federal appeals court decisions on class-action lawsuits. According to an Associated Press report on 17 October, the judge's ruling "does not affect" the "separate, non-monetary settlement with the Justice Department in which the Adam's Mark agreed to take steps to prevent discrimination in its 21 hotels." Although the monetary settlement has been voided, the plaintiffs are free to appeal the ruling or to pursue separate damages against Adam's Mark.

Recent Scholarship Online

The Journal of American History will soon release a searchable, online database of Recent Scholarship listings as a service for OAH members. The cumulative database will allow members to locate bibliographic citations for documents listed in the Recent Scholarship section of the Journal from the June 2000 issue forward.
Moving Recent Scholarship into a structured database format has allowed us to organize and represent the citations in new and more useful ways. Unlike the print version, in which a citation is listed under one and only one category, the database allows the crosslisting of each citation in up to four subject headings, enabling our editorial staff to define an article's scope more precisely. Such crosslisting will also enable users of the database to send more refined queries to the database's search engine.
Following are the types of questions that the Recent Scholarship database can answer using a simple and intuitive interface:

• What German-language articles published in 1999 on legal and constitutional history are part of the Recent Scholarship collection?
• What documents are listed under all three of the following categories: 1) Labor and Working Class History; 2) Women and Femininity; 3) Gender and Sexuality?
• What articles from the 1999 volume of the Journal of Women's History did the JAH list in Recent Scholarship?
• What documents containing the phase "Civil Rights Movement" are the in Recent Scholarship database?

The database will be online and available exclusively to OAH members beginning January 2001.

The OAH and National Park Service
New Ventures with NPS

Civil Rights
Working with the National Park Service (NPS) and the National Historic Landmarks Survey (NHLS), OAH has gathered a group of scholars to outline the history of civil rights across the United States. The project stems from the OAH's ongoing cooperative agreement with NPS, which, since 1994, has resulted in greater involvement for historians in the cultural resource management of the nation. When completed, the outline of a national historic context study will help federal planners recognize and preserve places that best illustrate America's civil rights history from 1776 to 1976. It will be a baseline for evaluating proposals by Congress and others for additions to the park system, historic trails, and heritage areas, and will assist in identifying themes that need further intensive research.
John H. Sprinkle and Susan Salvatore are guiding the project at the Landmarks Survey office. They are coordinating the work of eight historians who will define the important themes; identify nationally significant people, places, and events; provide bibliographies; review the larger theme study; and act as consultants for NPS as the project moves forward. Participants include, Al Camarillo (Stanford), Clayborne Carson (Stanford), Yong Chen (UC Irvine), Sara Evans (Minnesota), Alton Hornsby (Morehouse), James Riding In (Arizona State), Leila Rupp (Ohio State), and Charles Vincent (Southern University). NPS staff will present an early draft of the study for comment during a civil rights workshop at the OAH Annual Meeting in Los Angeles.

Desegregation in the Public Schools
The civil rights project follows on the heels of a related OAH-NPS partnership, the NHL Theme Study, "Racial Desegregation in Public Education in the United States," which recently was issued by the Government Printing Office. Historians Waldo Martin (Berkeley), Vicki Ruiz (Arizona State University), Pat Sullivan (Harvard), and Harvard Sitkoff (University of New Hampshire) in 1999-2000 together wrote a detailed essay placing the theme in a historical context. It forms the core of the study that will orient Park Service staff long into the future as they evaluate the significance of sites having to do with racial desegregation. At the moment, Ruiz and Sitkoff are transforming the fruits of the year-long project into an issue of the OAH Magazine of History, to appear in April 2001.