Summertime

Lee W. Formwalt

In late June, President Elect Nell Irvin Painter spent a week in Bloomington where she met with the staff of both the executive office and the Journal of American History editorial office as well as many of the American historians at Indiana University. Three weeks later, a dozen historical journal editors and History Cooperative partners met in Bloomington for our annual partners and associates meeting. The History Cooperative is the seven-year old partnership founded by OAH, AHA, the University of Illinois Press, and the National Academies Press, to create an electronic vehicle for the Journal of American History and the American Historical Review and eventually twenty other scholarly journals of history.

Painter

Between President Elect Painter’s visit and the History Cooperative meeting, several of the staff flew to Lincoln for the OAH Midwest Regional Conference where 220 historians enjoyed three days of fascinating sessions as well as visits to the Nebraska State Historical Society and the Homestead National Monument of America in Beatrice, Nebraska. A session on slavery, race, and politics in nineteenth-century America was a tribute to longtime MVHA/OAH member James A. Rawley, who had been on the faculty of the University of Nebraska since 1964 and had died last fall. Attendees were privileged to hear plenary speaker John Wunder, another University of Nebraska historian, deliver an entertaining and enlightening presentation on the early history of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. The plenary session was an early key event of our celebration of OAH’s one hundredth birthday this year. We learned that the founders of the MVHA were what we would call today public historians, the leaders of the major Midwest historical societies. Although largely a white male province, the MVHA had two women leaders in its early years—Louise P. Kellogg, president in 1930-1931, and Clara Paine, who replaced her husband Clarence Paine as MVHA secretary-treasurer in 1916 and served until her retirement in 1952.

Barbara Couture, Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic
addresses the audience at the opening plenary.

Mark Engler of Homestead National Monument of America (HNMA) makes opening remarks at the offsite session and outdoor barbecue at HNMA in Beatrice, Nebraska. Joining Engler on the panel are (left to right): Todd Arrington, HNMA, and Donald Stevens and Tom Richter of the Midwest Regional Headquarters of the National Park Service in Omaha, Nebraska.

Midwest historians were not the only history practitioners keeping busy last month. In June, July, and August, precollegiate American history teachers were attending workshops and seminars all over the country. Some of these were sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the National Endowment for the Humanities, but the greatest number were run by some of the 662 Teaching American History grant projects that have been funded by Congress since 2001. OAH has provided resources to a number of these projects, including copies of the OAH Magazine of History, guest presenters from the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program, and History Educator memberships in OAH. In fact, since 2001, the number of History Educator members in OAH has tripled to over 1,800, or 19 percent of our membership.

Once again I had the pleasure of visiting the TAH project in Jamestown, NY, and later this month I will be talking at the American History Cowboy Coalition in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The collaboration of historians and precollegiate teachers is more important than ever. At a time when the state of Florida has declared that in public schools “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed,” it is critical that history teachers in all schools, public and private, be reminded of the nature of history and that all history should be factual and constructed. As I told the Jamestown teachers, “Thank goodness, in the other forty-nine states and the District of Columbia, public school teachers don’t have to add this to their list of concerns as professional educators. I would venture that the teachers in this TAH project here in Jamestown know very well that history is constructed—they know that when they decide what to include and what not to mention in tomorrow’s class, they are constructing the past. And they don’t have to worry about whether they’re violating the law or if they’ll be ticketed for teaching a constructed history.” (For more on the Florida debate see page 17 and columns by Mary Beth Norton in the New York Times, July 2, 2006, and Jonathan Zimmerman in the Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2006.)

The problem with history in Florida public schools came up in two other history education conferences I attended in June. One was held at the University of Virginia and focused on the role of history departments in the training of history teachers; the other was held by the U.S. Department of Education on the creation of a clearinghouse for materials for Teaching American History projects. In both cases, we were concerned that American history teachers truly understand the nature of history as constructed and how to provide teachers with the training and materials they need to more effectively help their students understand and engage the American past.

Meanwhile, back in Bloomington, OAH staff wrapped up the fiscal year in June with a record number of members, topping 9,550 for the first time in the organization’s history. We are now looking ahead to our Centennial Convention in Minneapolis at the end of next March. There near the same location where the first Mississippi Valley Historical Association meeting was held in 1908, we will gather for an exciting program that will include our usual scholarly panels and teaching and public history sessions. In addition, we will include a series of centennial sessions that will examine the changes in the discipline and the profession over the last one hundred years. This is a meeting you will not want to miss.

While the staff prepares for our big centennial birthday, we have said good-bye to some members and hello to others. After two years of important and exemplary service as OAH Magazine of History editor, Kevin Byrne is returning to the classroom at Gustavus Adolphus College where he taught for three decades before joining our staff in 2004. Also departing the Magazine office is our graduate assistant and assistant editor Susanna Robbins who will be completing her dissertation at Indiana University. Replacing Kevin is former OAH Newsletter assistant editor Phillip M. Guerty. Phillip, a five-year veteran at OAH, is in the final stages of finishing his dissertation at IU. The new assistant editor of the OAH Magazine is Keith Eberly, an IU graduate student. His new colleague in the assistant editor position of the Newsletter is another IU graduate student Chad Parker. We also welcome our new OAH-IU Diversity Fellow Siobhan Carter to the OAH staff this month.  Siobhan will be working with OAH history education efforts for the next two years. Last spring we said farewell to Development Director Leslie Leasure, and this month we welcome our new director Susan Lyons.

New OAH Development Director Susan Lyons
meets with Executive Director Formwalt.

Susan comes to us from the Bloomington Hospital Foundation where she held the position of Development Director for the last eight years. We are delighted to welcome Susan, Siobhan, Chad, and Keith to our staff and to have Phillip with us in his new capacity as Magazine editor and assistant to the executive director. At the same time we thank Kevin and Susanna for all their work on the Magazine and wish them well in their new endeavors.