Glancing Backward: A Year-End Report

Lee W. Formwalt

This past year has been one of many accomplishments, not the least of which is anticipating the end of FY2001 in June without a deficit. Perhaps our biggest accomplishment in the last twelve months was surviving St. Louis and learning a number of lessons from that experience. Some of those lessons we have implemented as we prepared for this year's meeting in Los Angeles. We laid the groundwork for greater and more diverse attendance by reaching out to precollegiate teachers as well as historians at community and four-year colleges. OAH mailed 3,474 flyers advertising the meeting to Advanced Placement U.S. history teachers in southern California, members of the Southern California Historical Society, the California Association of Museums, history teachers in L.A.-area private schools, and historians in California community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities. Social studies administrators in California helped by sending 1,500 flyers to teachers in the L.A., Long Beach, and San Diego public school systems. We estimate that we contacted through direct mail approximately 5,000 individuals. Not only have we enhanced the program with the addition of regional receptions and Sunday morning Chat Rooms, but we have totally redesigned the Annual Meeting Program making it much more user-friendly while reducing its cost over previous years' Programs.

Last year, we organized and held the first OAH Regional Conference at Iowa State University. Two hundred fifty-three historians attended the August conference, only nine percent of whom were from community colleges and high schools. Of the balance, forty-five percent of the attendees were from research universities, twenty-three percent came from four-year colleges, and twenty-three percent were public historians employed by historical societies, state and federal government, and other institutions. The numbers as well as the feedback from attendees demonstrate that the regional meeting met the needs of historians who have expressed their concern about being "lost" at OAH annual meetings where university professors seem to dominate. Some of the most popular panels at the Midwestern conference were state-of-the-art sessions where prominent scholars updated their audiences on the latest historiographical developments in various historical fields. So successful were these sessions that we added one to the Los Angeles annual meeting program and will have a dozen or so at the 2002 annual meeting in Washington, DC. The success of the Midwestern Regional Conference at Iowa State University led the OAH Executive Board at its fall 2000 meeting to endorse future regional conferences on a biennial basis at college campuses (appealing to four-year college professors) preferably near National Park sites (appealing to public historians). The next conference will take place in the summer of 2003. A request for proposals seeking possible campus sites appears on page 20 in this Newsletter.

This past year we made our debut in the world of electronic publication with the online Journal of American History available on the History Cooperative web site (http://www.historycooperative.org/) since March 2000 and the online OAH Newsletter on the OAH web site since last August. OAH involvement in the History Cooperative entails an annual $25,000 payment to the Cooperative. This was a major factor that led to developing a new dues structure that allows institutional subscribers to bear their fair share of the cost of the e-JAH. At the History Cooperative web site, after a year of free access to the JAH, the gate was lowered in March. Now only members and institutional subscribers can access the Journal without charge. The initial partners of the History Cooperative--OAH, AHA, the University of Illinois Press and the National Academy Press--have added four associates to the venture: The William and Mary Quarterly, The History Teacher, Law and History Review, and The Western Historical Quarterly and will gradually expand its offerings of high-quality historical journals.

Additional electronic initiatives more recently brought online include the JAH's Recent Scholarship Online (RSO) database now available on the OAH web site (http://www.oah.org/rs/) and "Teaching the JAH," a new Ameritech-funded teaching effort on the JAH web site (http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching/).

While the History Cooperative may be our largest collaborative venture this year, OAH is working closely with other major history organizations to address professional needs. At the L.A. annual meeting a joint program committee consisting of representatives from OAH, AHA, and the National Council for the Social Studies will begin planning a new national, biennial history teaching conference. The first conference in Washington in late June 2002 will focus on teaching post-1945 history. Using funds from the now-dissolved National History Education Network office, OAH will hire a part-time graduate student in September to work with the program committee during the fall and to coordinate registration and the conference in the spring.

Another important collaboration in progress is the AHA–OAH Committee on Part-time and Adjunct Employment. This joint committee first met at the AHA annual meeting in Boston in January to address this major problem in the profession and has been communicating regularly via listserv. In addition to its meeting in Los Angeles, the committee sponsored a Sunday Chat Room as well as a session on the part-time situation in California, with special attention paid to community colleges.

Our oldest collaboration often goes unnoticed because it has worked so well for more than thirty years—our partnership with Indiana University. The editorial office of The Journal of American History has been on the Bloomington campus since 1963 and the executive office has been in the IU Foundation's antebellum Raintree House since 1970. Journal editor Joanne Meyerowitz and associate editor Steven M. Stowe teach half-time and I occasionally offer a course in the history department. Both the editorial and executive offices provide excellent opportunities for more than a half dozen IU graduate students each year who serve as editorial assistants for the Journal and associate editors of the OAH Newsletter and the OAH Magazine of History. Both the university and the organization are better institutions because of this partnership.

OAH's role as an advocate for the profession continued this past year with financial support for both the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History (Bruce Craig, executive director) and the National Humanities Alliance (John Hammer, executive director). Last month two Indiana University professors joined me and 130 other humanists for the National Humanities Alliance's second annual Jefferson Day in Washington to lobby on Capitol Hill for increasing support to NEH. The Bloomington contigent visited the offices of eight of Indiana's ten congressmen. We met mostly with staffers, but also spoke with one congressman. We spent much of our time clarifying the difference between NEH and NEA and touting the editions of the Founding Fathers' papers, the microfilming of newspapers, and the summer institutes and seminars. In several offices, staffers told us we were the first people promoting NEH that they had ever seen which demonstrated the importance of our advocacy role. If you wish to keep in close contact with developments relating to history on Capitol Hill, subscribe to NCC's free weekly Washington Updates delivered electronically to your e-mail address (see page 16). In the meantime, when particularly urgent measures demand your attention, such as the recent slashing by the Bush administration of the proposed National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) budget by a third, OAH will e-mail you as we did shortly before the L.A. meeting.

In L.A., we held a final session on La Pietra, the OAH–NYU initiative to internationalize the study of American history. Thomas Bender of NYU prepared a final report on the OAH-NYU four-year long effort which was published with Ford Foundation funds and mailed to all OAH members. One legacy of this very important initiative is the OAH's new La Pietra Dissertation Travel Fellowship in Transnational History which the executive board approved at its fall 2000 meeting in Baltimore. (See the announcement on page 14.)

We have indeed survived St. Louis, but it is not yet over. Adam's Mark has sued OAH for more than $100,000 for taking its stand against racism and not fulfilling its contract. Efforts to settle with the hotel last month failed. The trial in federal district court in St. Louis has been scheduled for 15 January 2002—the 73d birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.