History as Cocaine

2006 OAH Annual Meeting

Lee W. Formwalt

View photos from the 2006 OAH/NCPH Annual Meeting

"Yeah, we're the gateway drug. We're the pot and you're the cocaine." I'm not sure that the couple hundred American historians at the 2006 OAH convention plenary session on presidential assassinations had ever thought of themselves as the cocaine of history. Or that the popular purveyors of history like Assassins librettist John Weidman and the quirky writer Sarah Vowell who made this crack were the gateway drug that brought readers to seriously intoxicating professional history. But the metaphor did give some of us pause. And it suggested that in many ways popular and professional historians are in the same business—bringing the past alive. We may do it in different ways and for different purposes but we are not enemies—we should at least be collaborators.

Collaboration was much in evidence at our 99th annual meeting in Washington last month. The conference was our regular quadrennial joint meeting with the National Council on Public History and public history was well integrated into a number of sessions, including the evening plenaries. The opening night featured the directors of four Smithsonian history museums, the National Museum of American History, the National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of the American Indian, and the not yet built National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Another good example of collaboration was a session on Friday on Prince Hall and African American fraternalism. This panel, according to session organizer and chair Donald Yacovone, "embodied the spirit of this year's convention and represented a number of firsts. The panel drew from public and private historical agencies, included academic, independent, and public historians, and male and female and black and white participants. . . Even the audience reflected the convention's spirit. Rather than the usual Harris tweed-bound academics, the audience included a broad range of people, Park Service employees, historians, and a large number of our friends from the Masonic community. Indeed, the Grand Master of the Prince Hall Lodge . . . in Boston, really the head of all the 47 Prince Hall Grand Lodges across the country, attended, as did the Lodge's Grand Historian and representatives of local Masonic lodges, black and white."

Another OAH constituency well represented in Washington were precollegiate teachers. K-12 history teachers now number over 1,700 and comprise close to one-fifth of our membership. The opening day of the convention witnessed 150 early attendees discussing the impact of the Teaching American History (TAH) grant program on historians and the historical community. This preconference symposium brought together academic historians and precollegiate teachers in a collaborative way as do the five hundred or so TAH projects around the country.

Community college historians, perhaps the most underrepresented group of American historians in OAH, also let their voice be heard in Washington. They met with the community college committee, at the community college reception, and at several community college sessions. In addition, a number of them called for an additional meeting to discuss a new community college effort for which OAH is seeking federal funding.

Business, networking, and the discussion of the latest American history scholarship all happened at the Washington annual meeting. Members also made plans there for future meetings. We distributed programs for the Midwest Regional Conference in Lincoln on July 6-8 <http://www.oah.org/meetings/2006regional/>. The Centennial Committee and 2007 Program Committee also deliberated about next year's centennial convention in Minneapolis. At an initial meeting with incoming president-elect Nell Irvin Painter and her program committee chair Deborah Gray White, we discussed some of our ideas for the 2008 meeting in New York City. Later that year we are planning for a regional conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. By that time American citizens will need a passport to enter Canada, so start making your plans now. And for those of our members who like long-range planning, put the following OAH conventions on your post-2008 calendars: Seattle, 2009; Washington, 2010; Houston, 2011; Milwaukee, 2012; San Francisco, 2103; and Washington, 2014. In the meantime, get ready for our big centennial party next March in Minneapolis when we wish ourselves a happy 100th birthday!