Reflecting on Boston and Looking Ahead to Atlanta

Lee W. Formwalt

During the OAH Annual Meeting in March, the History News Network posted online daily reports about the convention as well as the latest gossip overheard in the halls of the Marriott Copley Place. On Saturday, it issued its “Top Three Reasons Why You Are Sorry You Missed This Year’s Convention.” All in all, it was an upbeat account of OAH’s second largest annual meeting ever with over 2,700 attendees.

For the second year in a row, staff and volunteers scrambled to assemble a stellar panel at the last minute on a burning issue of the day—this year it was on the gay marriage controversy, which was especially hot in Massachusetts. What is usually a standard element of each annual meeting—the presidential address—struck a real chord this year with the audience. Upon concluding her call for a new narrative and a new understanding of the civil rights movement, President Jacquelyn Dowd Hall received an emotional standing ovation that historians were remarking on for the rest of the meeting.

After being honored by the Southern Historian Association in Houston last November and the AHA in Washington, D.C., in January, former Mississippi Valley Historical Association president and OAH executive secretary Thomas D. Clark was recognized and honored in Boston for his contributions to OAH and the profession. Having celebrated his own one-hundredth birthday last summer, Clark helped another former executive secretary, Richard Kirkendall, launch the new OAH Centennial logo that will be used through the 2007 OAH centennial convention in Minneapolis.

The Boston convention saw several important innovations including a very successful first-timers’ session and a strand of sessions throughout the meeting on the topic of History and Memory. At the urging of the executive board and the program committee, a number of panelists presented or taught rather than read their papers. Still the change was difficult for many. Some presentations were too loose and unstructured, and many historians still read. Among the growing number of precollegiate teachers attending the OAH convention, there was some shock that college professors actually got up and read to them. But the comments from those who had witnessed the new session format were encouraging and we look for more presentation and less reading at the OAH Southern Regional Conference this summer in Atlanta and at the next annual meeting in San Francisco in March 2005.

Members attending the OAH Southern Regional Conference in Atlanta (July 8-11), cosponsored by Georgia State University and the Georgia Association of Historians, will find many of the more successful innovations they have experienced at recent annual meetings. State of the Field sessions, Focus on Teaching sessions, and a Screening History room will be among the standard scholarly sessions on the southern past as well as other areas of American history. Congressman John Lewis of Atlanta will deliver a plenary address at Martin Luther King’s beloved Ebenezer Baptist Church on Saturday evening. Very inexpensive accommodations ($37/night) will be available on the Georgia State University campus. The Liberty Legacy Foundation will provide fifty travel grants of $200 each for precollegiate teachers who wish to attend the conference. To apply online, point your browser to <http://www.oah.org/meetings/2004regional/travelgrants.html>.

For the complete program, check online at <http://www.oah.org/meetings/2004regional/>.