Memphis
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 Formwalt |
About a month before the annual meeting, the OAH staff in Bloomington was preparing for a disappointing turnout in Memphis. Initial preregistration figures were low and war loomed on the horizon. The OAH executive board met by conference call to discuss what should be done if the nation went on red alert and transportation was interrupted before or during the OAH annual meeting. By 1 April, however, preregistration figures had climbed as high as last year's Washington meeting and it looked like we would stay on orange alert. The handful of American historians trickling into Memphis that day soon turned into a veritable flood as over 2,480 practitioners of the discipline descended on the Memphis Cook Convention Center. Fully a third of these individuals were attending their first OAH meeting. The record attendance in Memphis--our largest meeting outside Washington in the last twenty-five years--reflects the recent healthy growth of the organization. Our latest monthly membership figures climbed over 8,900, the largest since 1994. Our 1,545 student members are also the largest number since that year, while our 965 history educator members (mostly precollegiate teachers) are the largest number ever. Part of the latter increase is due to the U.S. Department of Education's Teaching American History (TAH) program which Congress has supported with $150 million so far and with millions more on the way. Several of the TAH projects have included OAH membership for their teachers as part of their grants. In addition, for the second year in a row, the Department of Education brought over 350 representatives from the TAH grant projects to the OAH annual meeting for a series of sessions. The opening plenary on "Martin Luther King, Jr.: History, Memory and Social Justice" set the tone for the next several days of sessions and events. Cosponsoring several of this year's events was the April 4th Foundation, a Memphis group that commemorates yearly the anniversary of King's assassination. Historians joined Memphians on Friday evening for the April 4th Foundation annual banquet gala featuring former Southern Christian Leadership Conference president Joseph Lowery. Ira Berlin's presidential address, "American Slavery in History and Memory," on Saturday was the appropriate culmination for a convention devoted to "Social Justice and American History." Coming to Memphis, American historians expected to attend scholarly sessions and other events as well as to network with their colleagues who work in a variety of venues. In addition, this year, difficult issues both within and outside the profession required our attention. As planned, the executive board continued to discuss matters of integrity begun at its fall 2002 meeting and voted to create an ad hoc committee to advise the board on the OAH's role in dealing with future questions of professional ethics. Of even greater interest was the war which had begun in Iraq. A couple of weeks before the meeting, the executive board had appointed Joanne Meyerowitz, David Montgomery, and Ira Berlin to create a session on the impending conflict. Members flocked to the panel and C-SPAN broadcast live the standing room only session. Reaching beyond the walls of academe and the profession, historians provoked a response from 150 individuals around the country who wrote to the OAH executive office asking for copies of the session and expressing their viewpoints which ranged across the political spectrum. In response, we posted a link to the C-SPAN recording on our web site and more recently posted transcriptions of the panelists' remarks. The war sparked discussion throughout the meeting and resolutions expressing concern about the war's impact on freedom of expression were passed by both the executive board and members attending the annual business meeting Sunday morning. In addition to the regular sessions, chat rooms on reparations, disability history, and Bellesiles attracted members as did a new feature this year, "Screening History." Members had the opportunity to see some of the latest documentaries and to consider them for their classrooms or museums. OAH continues its efforts to reach out to historians at historically black colleges and universities, and Albany State University, Fort Valley State University, Texas Southern University, and Lemoyne-Owen College sponsored a session, reception, and chat room in Memphis. As Jacquelyn Hall mentions in her inaugural column as president, the OAH Strategic Plan has been developed, discussed and approved by the executive board (see p. 3). A flexible document that will be regularly revisited by the board, the plan encourages the kind of collaboration that has become the norm for OAH as we work with colleagues in other organizations to promote the best American history to our members, the profession, and an even broader audience. In Memphis, we finalized collaborative arrangements with three organizations interested in or devoted to American history: the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (GLI), the AP-U.S. History program, and the German American Studies Association. The Gilder Lehrman Institute will continue its support of the OAH Magazine of History, the OAH radio program Talking History, and travel grants for teachers to attend the OAH annual meeting. In addition, OAH and GLI will work together on a new initiative to create History High Schools in different parts of the country. GLI has already established several of these institutions where high school students take a full four years of American history. OAH and the AP U.S. History program will appoint a committee to vet articles on teaching the U.S. history survey course that will be posted on the AP web site, AP Central, and published in the OAH Magazine of History. In a continuation of OAH internationalization efforts, several officers met with Han Jürgen Grabbe, executive director of the German American Studies Association (GAAS), and sketched out a membership exchange program whereby OAH members could join GAAS for 40 while GAAS members can secure an electronic membership in OAH for $40. We are confident this agreement will expand German membership in OAH beyond the twenty-one historians currently on the rolls. As a membership organization, OAH depends on its members for support and governance. Membership dues provide a substantial portion of our income but we must rely on other sources to undertake the various efforts to promote American history beyond the annual meeting and the Journal of American History. You will be receiving shortly a letter from President Jacquelyn Hall requesting your support beyond your dues and I hope you will be generous. We also depend on the membership for governance, yet only a fraction of OAH members vote in our annual elections to choose members of the nominating and executive boards of the organization. In an effort to ease your electoral participation, we wish to introduce electronic voting this fall. All members for whom we have an email address will receive an email message in November with a link to the election page of the OAH web site. Members will simply click on the link, enter their membership number (found above your name on every OAH mailing label) and vote in a matter of seconds. Members choosing to vote this way will no longer have to mark a ballot, stick it in an envelope, affix a stamp and mail it to Bloomington. Individuals who do not have electronic access or would prefer to vote the traditional way may continue to do so--a ballot will be included in the November Newsletter. More membership organizations are switching to electronic voting and we hope that this less expensive and quicker electoral process will encourage more OAH members to participate in selecting their officers. To include electronic voting as an option, we need to amend the OAH constitution. Please clip the ballot on the top left of the back page of this Newsletter and mail it in to the executive office by 1 August. Your participation in the governance of your organization assures that your voice will be heard. |
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