Opening the Convention

John Dichtl

Ten years ago the OAH Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., had as its theme, “Widening the Circle of History.” This year’s meeting in San Francisco focuses on “Historians and their Publics.” It is a similar motif, but one that demonstrates a decade of expansive thinking about how and where historians do their work and the audiences that historians are trying to reach. The 2005 Annual Meeting acknowledges that the circle of history has widened and looks outward from that center. It examines the many ways historians in different venues connect to and serve a variety of audiences, each of which is public in some sense.

Best exemplifying this spirit is the 2005 Program Committee’s plan to have all sessions on Friday afternoon take place outside the convention hotel, in the historic neighborhoods of San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. The schedule of events allows time for lunch beforehand near or en route to each offsite location, whether it be Mission Dolores, the Chinese Historical Society of America, Alcatraz, the Presidio, the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, the Oakland Museum of California, the African American Art and Culture Complex, the GLBT Historical Society, or the San Francisco Public Library. Conference goers will find the staff at many of these venues willing to provide tours of their facilities or access to their collections. To reach a larger audience, each session will be open to the general public.

The two plenary sessions of the convention, also open to the public, explore the connections between U.S. history and the history of the Pacific Rim. On Thursday evening, John Dower addresses U.S. involvement in the Pacific during the twentieth century with comments by Gordon Chang and Carol Gluck. Friday night’s plenary marks the 30th anniversary of the Vietnam War with a discussion by Frances Fitzgerald, Duong Van Mai Elliott, David Maraniss, and Daniel Ellsberg. Other thematic threads connecting sessions across the meeting include California history, the West, the American military role in the world, and immigration and citizenship.

State of the Field sessions at the annual meeting also provide an opportunity for conversations across specialties. We created this type of session five years ago to help scholars and teachers not deeply immersed in a particular subfield to understand how it has developed over the last twenty years. Conference attendees this year may choose from state of the field sessions on Economic History, Ethnohistory of North American Regions, Intelligence History, Migration and Ethnic History, Spanish Borderlands, Visual and Material Culture, Ethnohistorical Theory, Atlantic World, Rural History, and Race as a Historical Concept.

A vibrant area of continuing improvement in the annual meeting over the past decade is the participation of K-12 teachers and the scheduling of events that promote collaboration between historians and K-12 faculty. Ten years ago in Washington, D.C., the OAH offered “Focus on Teaching Day.” In San Francisco there will be teaching sessions and events spread across all four days of the meeting, and many panels include a mix of precollegiate teachers, college/university faculty and other historians. Travel grants of up to $400 from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History will help fifty teachers attend the convention this year. Teachers will be able to claim certificates of professional development verifying their participation in the meeting. And new this year will be a Teacher Hospitality Center where K-12 educators and others interested in precollegiate teaching will be welcomed with refreshments and informal discussion with colleagues. The center will be located in the busy hub of the book exhibit hall. From the session panels to the hospitality center, the underlying current is collaboration among historians and precollegiate teachers.

Another innovation this year, which reinforces the ways historians are trying to reach broader audiences and develop allies along the way, is the inauguration of the OAH Friend of History Award. It is given in recognition of an individual or organization outside the historical profession that has demonstrated support for history. The OAH prizes and awards ceremony takes place immediately before James O. Horton’s presidential address, “Public History in Public Service.” To draw a wider swath of meeting participants, the OAH president’s address for the first time will be on Saturday afternoon rather than in the evening.

Three additional sets of events during the 2005 meeting reflect OAH’s goal of encouraging historians, teachers, and other history professionals to be aware of “their publics” and through collaboration to reach broader audiences. OAH itself is partnering with the National Park Service, Palgrave Macmillan, and the College Board Advanced Placement History program. For two and a half days prior to our conference, National Park Service (NPS) historians from around the country will participate in a preconference meeting in the OAH convention space. Historians and interpretive staff have made exciting changes throughout NPS and at the many sites under its care. The history-related sites in the park system alone receive more than seventy-five million visitors each year. Conference goers who want a behind-the-scenes look at an exciting future NPS site should register for the all-day tour, presentations, and discussions at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Homefront National Historical Park in Richmond, California.

While some history consumers will visit historical parks, other members of the general public will choose to pick up a good book. To reach this broader reading audience, OAH and the publisher Palgrave Macmillan have launched a book project. OAH Past President Joyce Appleby is serving as editor of the volume tentatively titled, The OAH’s Best American History Essays 2006. Appleby and an editorial board of nine historians will be meeting at the convention to discuss their work of combing through a wide variety of journals and magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, to find the best written and most accessible essays on history. We hope to make this an annual publication.

A second OAH book project taking shape at the 2005 Annual Meeting is a joint effort with the College Board’s Advanced Placement U.S. History program. The volume, scheduled for 2006, will be a collection of the essays already appearing in the OAH Magazine of History and on the AP Central web site as a series called “America on the World Stage.” Each article takes a significant subject in American history and places it in international context, and all within the framework of a high school or college-level U.S. survey course. The Ad Hoc OAH-AP Joint Advisory Board on Teaching the U.S. History Survey, chaired by Gary Reichard, is serving as the editorial board for this project and will be offering a session about the essay series on Saturday afternoon.

All of these initiatives to improve how we engage our “publics” begin with that impulse to “widen the circle of history,” a long-running endeavor to increase our understanding of the past by including a greater variety of subject matters, methodologies, venues, and practitioners. The 2005 meeting offers us a chance to step back and assess our progress.