News of the Organization

Personalized Email Updates of New Scholarship Now Available

OAH Appoints Magazine of History Editor

2003-2004 Actions Taken by the OAH Executive Board and the Business Meeting

Personalized Email Updates of New Scholarship Now Available

The Journal of American History staff has launched an exciting new feature of Recent Scholarship Online. In addition to having a fully searchable and cumulative database of history-related citations at their fingertips, OAH members may now sign up to receive quarterly emails listing the latest articles, books, and dissertations being written in their own areas of interest. Members who visit <http://www.oah.org/rs> can create an account profile by customizing the keywords and categories of scholarship they wish to track—they will then receive quarterly lists of relevant citations. Stay up-to-date in your areas of research and teaching interest by filling out a form. (You will need your membership number, which appears above your name on the mailing label of this OAH Newsletter or any other OAH publication.) The email citations arrive in your e-mailbox months before they will appear in the print issue of the JAH.

Also new to Recent Scholarship Online this summer is the user’s ability to save his or her bibliography, from one session of use to another. Much like the “shopping carts” used during online credit card purchases, this personalized bibliography function allows one to pick and choose individual citation during searches of the database. Now OAH members also have the capability of editing their collections of search results and saving them in personalized accounts.

OAH Appoints Magazine of History Editor: Kevin B. Byrne joins Bloomington Staff this Summer

Kevin B. Byrne has been appointed editor of the OAH Magazine of History. Byrne, a longtime member of OAH, has served on the organization’s Committee on Teaching as well as the Magazine’s Advisory Board. Byrne completed his graduate work at Duke University and for most of his career was a professor in the history department of Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. He served as chair of the department, associate dean for International Experiential Education, and coordinator of the Secondary Education Social Studies Program in the Education Department.

The recipient of numerous grants and professional honors, Byrne is completing a sabbatical year as Scholar in Residence at Duke and Visiting Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Byrne brings with him a rich experience in teaching, both as a teacher of the college survey of U.S. history and in working with precollegiate teachers. In the latter area, he advised and taught social studies education students at Gustavus Adolphus College. In addition he served as a reader for the Advanced Placement U.S. History tests where he worked with other college professors as well as numerous secondary school teachers. Byrne has authored a number of articles, editorials, and book reviews and has edited two books.

Expansion of the Magazine is a key component of the OAH Strategic Plan’s goal to influence American history education at all levels. Several grants from foundations, including the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, have allowed the Magazine staff this past year to improve its content and enhance the visual appearance of the publication. Beginning in January 2005, the Magazine will appear six times a year.

2003-2004 Actions Taken by the OAH Executive Board and the Business Meeting

Subsequent to its November 2003 Fall Meeting the Executive Board took the following actions (by email):

• On December 11, 2003, voted to award the OAH Distinguished Service Award at the 2004 Annual Meeting in Boston to Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.
• On January 5, 2004, authorized the president to appoint an editor and editorial board for the OAH-Palgrave publication project for the best essays in American history.
• On January 14, 2004, voted to recommend that Yale graduate student petitioner, not the board, present her resolution (“that the Yale administration and GESO [the graduate employee union at Yale] should . . . ‘find a mutually acceptable forum for reaching some understanding about conduct that members of the Yale community regard as a genuine threat to their freedom of belief and expression.’”) to the Business Meeting of the OAH in Boston on March 28, 2004.
• On January 29, 2004, agreed to posting the summary of traditional vs. revisionist history (with the OAH staff introduction) on the web site, upon its revision.
• On February 6, 2004, voted to have the 2009 annual meeting in Seattle, Washington.
• On February 12, 2004, unanimously approved the report of the executive director review committee and reappointed Lee W. Formwalt to a five-year term.
• On February 19, 2004, voted to present 100-year-old former MVHA president and OAH executive secretary Thomas D. Clark a special Centennial Award at the OAH Annual Meeting in Boston.

At its 2004 spring meeting in the Boston Marriott Copley Place hotel the Executive Board took the following actions:

• Approved the November 1-2, 2003, minutes of the OAH Executive Board Meeting in Boston.
• Directed the executive office staff at the next board meeting to provide a proposal for improving the organization’s publicity and media relations capabilities.
• Approved the proposal to reduce the exchange of publications with the National Council for History Education (i.e., the OAH Magazine of History for NCHE’s History Matters!) since the OAH Magazine of History will soon be published six times per year and the cost of the exchange would otherwise increase by fifty percent for the OAH.
• Charged the executive office staff by the next board meeting to suggest ways of increasing voter turnout in the OAH annual election of officers.
• Approved replacing medals and paper certificates for OAH prizes and awards with plaques.
• Commended the BeyondAcademe web site and its creators for their efforts to provide alternative career advice for history graduate students and historians currently employed in colleges and universities <http://www.beyondacademe.com/>.
• Voted to approve JAH editor Joanne Meyerowitz’s appointment recommendations for the following board and committees. JAH Editorial Board: Winston James, Columbia University; Jane Kamensky, Brandeis University; and James Kloppenberg, Harvard University. Pelzer Prize Committee: Carl Guarneri, St. Mary’s College of California. Thelen Prize Committee: Leila Rupp, University of California at Santa Barbara, and Axel R. Schafer, Keele University.
• Requested that executive board members Robert Cherny, David Kennedy, and Lee Formwalt at the next board meeting report on creating a strategic reserve fund for the organization.
• Approved the organization’s operating budget for FY2005.
• Agreed to further consider the preliminary report of the Ad Hoc Committee on the OAH Constitution and to provide feedback on the suggested revisions to the constitution and bylaws.
• Authorized OAH President James O. Horton to create an ad hoc committee to investigate reports of repressive measures by the government, officials of schools, colleges, and universities and self-designated groups dedicated to political surveillance that impact historians’ teaching, research, employment, and freedom of expression.
• At the request of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Historical Profession, approved creation of a survey, to be conducted by the OAH executive office, to collect and document personal stories of academic and professional pressures (promotion, tenure, etc.) on male and female historians raising children.
• At the request of the Joint Committee on Part-Time and Adjunct Employment, agreed to support the committee in approaching college and university history departments around the country to have them adopt the OAH and AHA standards on part-time and adjunct employment. Also charged the committee to maintain a list of the departments that adopt the standards and to publicize this list on the OAH web site.
• Adopted the following resolutions proposed by the Committee on Research and Access:

1. OAH recommends that actual funding of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for FY2005 be no less than $10 million.
2. OAH supports NHPRC funding for a regrant program for states to be used for electronic and other programs, so long as such program does not affect current allocation of NHPRC funding at $10 million.
3. OAH recommends that editions be moved to a retrievable and permanent digital environment.

• Voted unanimously to adopt the following resolution on the Federal Marriage Amendment, which was presented by petition of OAH members:
  • Research by numerous scholars who have studied marriage, sexuality, and kinship throughout U.S. history supports the view that diverse types of families, including families built on same-sex partnerships, have existed across time, even as law and government have accorded some of those families unequal status. Laws and customs regulating marriage, as well as the U.S. Constitution, have not been static, but have tended to increase the number of people entitled to claim the benefits and responsibilities of legal marriage. Because no evidence exists that a viable democracy depends upon defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and because the campaign against same-sex marriage promotes discrimination, the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians strongly opposes a federal constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.

The following action was taken (by telephone) by the Executive Board subsequent to the 2004 Annual Meeting in Boston:

• Agreed that the executive office should implement a range of fees for the OAH Distinguished Lectureship program instead of a single flat rate.

The following action was taken by the Membership at the Business Meeting on Sunday, 28 March, during the 2004 Annual Meeting in Boston.

• Voted to adopt the following resolution:

WHEREAS Yale graduate employees have been trying to unionize for twelve years.

AND WHEREAS, whatever our opinions on unionization, we believe that discussion around this question should occur in an atmosphere which reflects the values of the academy.

AND WHEREAS an academic labor panel was convened on September 20, 2003, to consider charges of intimidating and coercive behavior by the Yale administration and some faculty. The panel consisted of: Fred Feinstein (chairman), former NLRB General Counsel; Cynthia Estlund, Professor, Columbia Law; Karl Klare, Professor Northeastern Law; Adolph Reed, Professor, Political Science at the New School; Robert Reich, Professor, Brandeis, and former U.S. Labor Secretary; and Emily Spieler, Dean, Northeastern School of Law.

AND WHEREAS their statement notes, “The fact that so many students reported threatening and intimidating experiences, including in relationships with their immediate academic supervisors, itself raises a serious concern . . . Even if the reports we heard at the forum are exaggerated or mistaken, everyone connected with Yale should be alarmed by the apparent level of distrust, which cannot serve the interests of any segment of the community.”

AND WHEREAS the statement concludes, “we note with regret that the consequence of the administration’s position, if sustained by the NLRB, is that the serious charges of intimidation and interference with expressional freedom raised by GESO’s supporters will never receive any sort of adjudicative hearing.”

BE IT RESOLVED that the Yale administration and GESO (the graduate employee union at Yale) should, as recommended by this statement, “find a mutually acceptable forum for reaching some understanding about conduct that members of the Yale community regard as a genuine threat to their freedom of belief and expression. That forum could be the NLRB if all parties conceded its jurisdiction; or it could be another forum devised by the parties.”