A Conference Revolution in the Making

John Dichtl

Come to the 2004 Annual Meeting in Boston and you should notice some striking changes in how a conference is run. Not only has the 2004 Program Committee crafted an innovative event, but it has begun to implement the organization’s Strategic Plan to make the annual meeting more dynamic and engaging between now and the OAH’s one-hundredth anniversary. In Boston this March a revolution begins. From there we hope it will carry to San Francisco in 2005, Washington, D.C., in 2006, and Minneapolis for the OAH Centennial in 2007.

First, there is a fundamental challenge to the old order. In Boston we are launching the beginning of a campaign to reduce the number of papers that are read to conference goers. The point is not to force immediate change or for all presenters to adopt a different style, but to begin asserting that the traditional kind of presentation—read papers, comment on papers, answer questions—need no longer be the standard one. Certainly most of us, at conferences past, have shared the wish that more paper presenters—perhaps ourselves—could be more efficient and compelling. Why travel to a conference to have so much read aloud to us that we could track down and read ourselves on a website, in a listserv, or through direct email? Like OAH, the AHA, American Studies Association, and others are attempting to shake up what Roy Rosenzweig recently termed the “scholarly ritual … of reading written papers aloud” (see “Should the Format of the Annual Meeting Be Changed?” AHA’s Perspectives, September 2003).

Many presenters may still prefer to read their work, but the OAH Executive Board would like all to know it endorses innovations that invigorate the exchange of ideas. Last fall the board adopted a statement challenging the primacy of the traditional session format. (See previous page for the Presentation Guidelines as approved by the OAH Executive Board.) The board hopes more conference participants will enliven their time on the dais by trying to “teach their material” as they would in a classroom or by finding other ways to make it engaging. The presentation guidelines, which originated in the OAH Strategic Plan, were worked into the 2005 Call for Papers and will be more fully integrated into the 2006 call. The spirit of change embodied in this resolution is also reflected throughout the 2004 Program Committee’s plan for an innovative and open conference, March 25-28.

We are trying to do more than scholarly conferences typically do—descend on a host city, hunker down in a convention hotel for three days, and leave on Sunday morning without having sparked local attention or otherwise engaged with history’s friends in the local community. Two plenary sessions in Boston will be at venues outside the hotel, with keynote speakers who appeal to OAH members and the general public alike. On Thursday night at the Old South Meeting House, Howard Zinn will speak on “The Uses of History.” Friday night at Union United Methodist Church, the Honorable Robert L. Carter will discuss his role in and the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. These and more than a dozen other offsite sessions will be free and open to the public. They inaugurate a major OAH effort to not only get historians and teachers to delve into the local history and culture of the conference city, but to find ways to invite members of the local community into the annual meeting itself.

Other transformations will premier in Boston next month. A session to help orient first-time attendees will take place on Thursday at 4:30 p.m. Speakers from the OAH Membership Committee will offer suggestions about mining the rich resources of the annual meeting. Another innovation will be the thread of history and memory sessions that runs throughout the meeting. And thanks to an outstanding Local Resource Committee, each of the several tours has been carefully crafted around a unique slice of Boston history and has a historian as guide. Some of the tours offer discussions or roundtables afterward, peeks behind the scenes at historical parks and exhibits, and one includes a living history performance. Our Screening History film series from last year continues, but will focus on films that have won or been runners up in 2003 and 2004 for the OAH Erik Barnouw Award.

You will not be alone in assessing the radical changes afoot at the Boston conference. Michael Frisch (chair), Thomas Dublin, Estelle Freedman, Stephanie McCurry, Marla R. Miller, and Roy Rosenzweig constitute the newly formed Committee on the OAH Annual Meeting, which is charged with evaluating all of these new practices and making recommendations for further improvements. By the time of the one-hundredth annual meeting of the organization, in 2007, the revolutionary impulse should be incorporated thoroughly into OAH conferences.