OAH 2005 San Francisco

Martha Sandweiss and James Grossman

We hope the 2005 annual meeting will encourage conversation among a broad range of historians and send participants out into the streets of San Francisco to experience local history firsthand. The theme for the conference, “Telling America’s Stories: Historians and their Publics” emphasizes the practice of history in a variety of venues. Many of the panels include a mix of historians who work in such places as museums, parks, colleges and universities, high schools, and libraries. Moreover, on Friday afternoon, all of the sessions will take place off-site, at local San Francisco area venues that are not only of historical significance themselves, but make history widely accessible through their archival resources and public programming.

Acknowledging San Francisco’s own rich history, the conference gives particular emphasis to Pacific Rim history and to the history of California and the West, from early immigration patterns to the economics of Silicon Valley. The two plenary sessions that anchor the conference both look westward from California to Asia. On Thursday night John Dower will look broadly at the history of the United States’ involvement in the Pacific during the twentieth century, with comments by Carol Gluck and Gordon Chang. On Friday night Fred Logevall will lead a panel discussion marking the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam with participants Frances Fitzgerald, Daniel Ellsberg, David Maraniss and Duong Van Mai Elliott. Thematically related sessions include a number of panels on America’s role in the world, in a military context, as well as in terms of immigration and citizenship.

The program for Friday afternoon invites all participants to venture out of the conference hotel and into the city of San Francisco. A session at the San Francisco Public Library will consider “What Does California Mean?”; a discussion of history in the National Park Service will take place on Alcatraz Island. Speakers will address the history of student activism on site at the University of California, Berkeley, while the Oakland Museum will host a panel on the history of the Black Panther Movement. Additional sessions will take place simultaneously at the California Historical Society, the Presidio, Mission Dolores, the Chinese Historical Society, the San Francisco African American Historical & Cultural Society, and the GLBT Historical Society.

Responding to the helpful suggestion of last year’s conference participants we will continue the popular program of State of the Field sessions. This year we will feature broad overviews of new scholarship in the fields of ethnohistory, religion, race, economic history, visual and material culture, intelligence history and rural history. We will also continue last year’s successful program of linked sessions, some of them continuing in the same room. Finally, with the hope that we can help create the more dynamic and interactive sort of program for which OAH members have voiced deep support, we are encouraging speakers to present their work in a more lively manner, speaking directly to the audience rather than reading their work.

Martha Sandweiss and James Grossman are cochairs of the 2005 OAH Annual Meeting Program Committee.