Centennial Reflections

As we approach our one-hundredth birthday, the staff at the OAH executive office has been exploring our past. The first quarter-century of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association’s (MVHA) history was a world that we could relate to in some ways—after all it was a historical society and it consisted of American historians. A half-century ago, former MVHA president James L. Sellers crafted a history of the association for its semicentennial, and I found his description of longtime secretary/treasurer Clara Paine’s job quite familiar—“the collecting of dues, paying of bills, keeping of records, holding on to old members, securing new ones, soliciting guarantors and collecting their pledges, preparing budgets, satisfying editors and officers. In fact she became a clearing center that was much more than financial” (1). We do all of these things today in the OAH executive office in Bloomington. Another significant continuity from our earliest days to the present is that this historical association remains solidly grounded on two pillars—the annual meeting and the scholarly journal. The annual meeting has been held every year, but one, since 1908, and the scholarly journal (first the Mississippi Valley Historical Review and now the Journal of American History) has appeared regularly since 1914. Next spring, we journey back to our roots when we return to Minneapolis for the OAH’s centennial convention near the shores of Lake Minnetonka, site of the first annual meeting.

I suspect, however, that many of us would find the world of the MVHA, particularly before 1950, to be an alien world, many parts of which we would not recognize or find comfortable. First of all, it was clearly a world of white men (see photograph on page 1). Among its first seventy-five presidents were two women and one African-American man. John Hope Franklin was the first president of color in 1974, and Gerda Lerner the second female president in 1981. Before her, there was only one woman president in our first seventy-five years—Louise P. Kellogg in 1930. True, Clara Paine served as secretary/treasurer for thirty-six years from 1916 to 1952. She stepped into the position when her husband, Clarence S. Paine, the founding secretary/treasurer, died unexpectedly. Opposition to her holding that position was more because she was a woman than her not being a historian.

An American historian in the first half of the twentieth century was by and large white and male, incredibly important exceptions like W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary Beard notwithstanding. And for most members, an unthinking acceptance of their white male privilege pervaded their world and their scholarship. Linked to this commonly accepted racism and sexism was the idea that the history scholar’s role was simply to chronicle change in society, not reform it. Not only were scholars to refrain from advocating change in the wider society, but they considered it inappropriate to address professional problems, like low salaries or a tight job market. When they advocated, they promoted only what they considered to be scholarly matters.

In one sense, many MVHA members saw their association as a learned society, but not necessarily a professional organization. But as the association grew in size—by 1931 it had over 1,000 members; by 1949, over 2,000; and by 1957, over 3,000—some members began to advocate change, and a struggle between insurgents and traditionalists ensued. Eventually in the 1950s and 1960s, the insurgents won, and the association began to see its role as not only writing history but also challenging what was wrong in society. Members passed resolutions objecting to loyalty oaths and holding meetings in segregated facilities. Eventually, in the heat of the Vietnam War, members passed a resolution calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. For several years, the organization refused to hold conventions in states that rejected the Equal Rights Amendment.

Although much progress has been made in the last quarter-century, diversity—racial, gender, and professional—is not as widespread as many would like. Yes, the number of women members has increased significantly, but they still comprise only a third of our membership, a percentage comparable to the profession as a whole. Racial and ethnic diversity in OAH is also discouraging, with only 7 percent of our members self-identifying as African American, Latino/a, Asian American, or Native American. Professional diversity is another concern. While we have made great strides in increasing our precollegiate teaching members (now at 19 percent), our public history numbers have remain fairly static at 15 percent and our handful of community college members make up a mere 4.5 percent. The greatest diversity in the organization can be found in its governing body, the executive board, as well as the nominating board. This has resulted from a policy adopted in the late 1990s to allow for paired elections, thus ensuring that certain constituency groups (e.g., community college historians and precollegiate teachers) are represented by selecting two members of a certain constituency to run against each other.

If we have made important progress on the diversity front, recognizing there is much still to be done, even more significant advances have been made in our advocacy efforts. Here we see clearly the important transition of OAH as a learned society into a professional organization as well. OAH was actively involved in the formation of what is now the National Coalition for History (NCH), our one-person lobbying machine in Washington. For the last six years, Bruce Craig has been history’s face on Capitol Hill, and we will surely miss him when he leaves in December. OAH and AHA are the largest supporters of NCH and are actively involved in its governance. We also play a major role in the National Humanities Alliance (NHA), which is a lobbying group largely for maintaining and increasing congressional support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Another major change that can be traced throughout the MVHA’s and OAH’s history has been the subject of its members’ historical research, publication, teaching, and presentation. MVHA started out as a regional historical society formed by public historians—the leaders of the major Midwestern state historical societies. But as its membership grew, it lost much of its public history dimension, especially as college professors came to dominate the membership as early as 1915. For some time, the geographical limits remained the Appalachians in the East and the Rocky Mountains in the West. But by the 1940s, it was clear that the MVHA had all of American history, not just the Midwest, as its purview. More and more of its members came from the east and west coasts, although it was not until 1969 and 1970 that its conventions became bicoastal with meetings in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Finally in 1964, despite the resistance of MVHA traditionalists, the Mississippi Valley Historical Review’s subtitle, Journal of American History, became its new name, and the following year the MVHA became the Organization of American Historians. Three decades later, the OAH executive board endorsed a series of efforts to internationalize American history, bringing to fruition a long journey from regional to national to international organization.

Another area that has seen significant change in OAH’s first century has been public history. Although the term public history became popular only in the last quarter-century, public historians have been around as long as history itself. Through the middle decades of the last century, however, academic historians were at the pinnacle of the profession and below them in status and importance were public historians and precollegiate teachers. Only in the last quarter-century has the status of public historians risen. Part of that can be attributed to the increasing number of Ph.D.s trained as academic historians who could not find teaching jobs in an ever tighter job market. In 1979 public historians organized and created the National Council for Public History.

Public historians complain, and rightly so, that they are not recognized and do not have the same status as academic historians. OAH values the contributions of public historians to the profession. We are all practitioners of history whether in the college or precollegiate classroom, or in the government, a historical society, historic park, or business. Academic historians have a lot to learn from public historians and their work with the wider public outside of academe. Public historians sit on the OAH executive and nominating boards, annual meeting program committees as well as other service and awards committees. The Committee on Public History insures that the organization remains strongly connected to history as it is practiced in the wider world. For the first time in recent memory, OAH has selected a public historian—Pete Daniel of the National Museum of American History—to serve as its president in 2008–9.

Perhaps the best example of OAH involvement with public history has been our twelve-year collaboration with the National Park Service. OAH serves as a bridge between its academic and public historians and the Park Service historians. Over the last decade and more, it has provided the very latest scholarship to a wide public audience—the seventy-five million visitors to historic National Park sites.

If public historians have felt at times like second-class citizens in OAH, that has certainly been the case with precollegiate teachers and community college historians. At some of their earliest meetings, MVHA leaders expressed concern about the state of high school history teaching. Academic historians, however, generally looked down on precollegiate teachers. In his 1978 article on MVHA and OAH history, Ray Billington, who pointed out the racism and sexism of earlier MVHA members, nonetheless referred to their Saturday morning papers at annual meetings as “designed to appeal to the local schoolmarms” (2).

This sense of superiority over school teachers has certainly diminished over time. Within a few years of Billington’s remark, the OAH began the OAH Magazine of History, a publication designed to provide good solid materials for precollegiate history teachers. In addition to the Magazine of History, OAH has included precollegiate teachers on its executive and nominating boards, established a Teaching Committee and integrated teaching sessions into the annual meeting. To recognize and reward quality precollegiate teaching, the Tachau Teacher of the Year Award was established, and each year, one of the nation’s outstanding teachers is honored at the annual meeting. For a decade or more, OAH attracted several hundred precollegiate teachers as members. In the last five years, largely as a result of the more than 600 million federal dollars poured into the Teaching American History grant program, the number of precollegiate teaching members in OAH has tripled to over 1,800 and now comprise 19 percent of our membership.

Another group in the profession today that played little if any role in the old MVHA was community college historians. There were only twenty-five community colleges in the entire nation at the time the MVHA was founded. By 1960, there were 412. Then in the Sixties, community colleges grew at an explosive rate. Within ten years, the number of community colleges more than doubled. When the history job market at four-year colleges and universities plummeted in the 1970s, many Ph.D.s in history turned to community colleges as alternative places to practice their craft. Even though many community college historians had been trained at the same schools and in the same ways as their university colleagues, the latter often treated them the same way they treated precollegiate teachers. Eventually community college historians made their voices heard and the governing body of OAH responded, first with an ad hoc and then a permanent committee on community colleges. In 1999, under the leadership of Nadine Ishitani Hata, OAH community college historians published a status report on historians in U.S. community colleges.

In addition to its efforts to include public historians, teachers, and community college historians as members, the OAH has reached out to an even broader audience outside of academe and the profession. One of the organizations’s goals has been to bring the very latest and very best American history to the wider public interested in learning about our past. The OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program, created by President-Elect Gerda Lerner in 1980, has become an important outreach effort that brings over a hundred OAH lecturers each year to campuses, schools, historical societies, and other venues around the country. Our most recent effort to bring the latest and best American history to the general public has been a collaborative project with Palgrave Macmillan to publish an annual volume of the Best American History Essays. The first volume debuted last spring and the second volume will appear next March at the Centennial convention.

As we look ahead to OAH’s next century, we must consider how we can continue to provide the kind of support that American historians need to practice their craft, to keep the widest access possible to historical sources, and to disseminate their work to their colleagues and to the wider world that is thirsting for a deeper understanding of our past. This mission served us well in our first century. Our challenge is to carry it out under the known and yet unknown perils and obstacles of the next hundred years.

Endnotes

1. James L. Sellers, “The Semicentennial of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (Dec. 1957): 505.

2. Ray Allen Billington, “From Association to Organization: The OAH in the Bad Old Days,” Journal of American History 65 (June 1978): 76.