One Hundred Years of History: Extraordinary Change, Persistent Challenges

William H. Chafe

Chafe

In three masterful papers before the OAH’s centenary convention in Minneapolis in March, former OAH president Michael Kammen and former executive directors Richard Kirkendall and Arnita Jones provided a comprehensive assessment of the changes and continuities that have characterized our evolution as a professional association. Interestingly, all three papers reflected a series of abiding tensions that suggest continuity as well as discontinuity over certain fundamental issues of identity that have affected us from the very beginning of our professional organization: Who do we represent? Is it our role to be an assemblage of elite scholars from a narrow range of research universities and liberal arts colleges, or an inclusive body of practitioners of American history ranging from university professors to high school and community college teachers and all those who fall under the (admittedly inadequate) rubric of “public historians?” Should our professional standard of conduct be one of seeking “scientific” detachment and objectivity, or one of engaged advocacy for issues—and constituencies—that we see as important in advancing the principles of a democratic society? Although in some ways these questions seem like a summary of the last decade’s most pressing controversies, in fact they represent challenges that have confronted us from the inception of the organization’s existence.

As Michael Kammen demonstrated in his overview of the first fifty years of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association’s existence, our organization was initially “a fraternity of western historians”—in fact “public historians” from various state historical societies – defined by its difference from the more elitist, east coast American Historical Association.

A second large issue was the choice between developing a “scientific” approach to various state histories and Frederick Jackson Turner’s emphasis on the West as “the special home of democracy.” In the one case, detailed local histories would be emphasized, in the other, broader, more politically inflected interpretive approaches would be encouraged.

A third and related issue was whether the MVHA would dwell on the scholarly findings of research scholars or broaden its reach to include all those who were interested in teaching history and social studies.

Although Kammen shows that these issues were never definitively resolved, the MVHA over time spoke ever more boldly on issues of free speech and public policy, and moved to link the study of history and concern for social reform. The MVHA remained a distinctively white male enclave with a limited membership, but it was evolving in a direction that would change all that.

In his paper, Richard Kirkendall showed how the MVHA gradually evolved into the OAH (with the Journal of American History as its scholarly publication), its membership vaulting from a little more than 3,000 in 1957 to almost 12,000 a decade later. The most important development during that period, Kirkendall shows, was the much belated recognition of women and blacks in the organization’s ranks and leadership—itself a reflection of the turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s when black history and women’s history became defining priorities for a generation of graduate students as well as the nation as a whole. This shift resulted in new program themes at annual meetings, a significant change in who was elected to the executive board, and how actively the OAH weighed in on public policy issues involving race and gender. During the period since 1981, more and more women and blacks—as well as white males whose scholarship focused on issues of gender and race—have served in leadership positions; the OAH joined in the boycott of convention sites that had not ratified the ERA (and more recently shifted convention sites over civil rights and labor issues); and issues of academic freedom became a priority on executive board and business meeting agendas.

Not surprisingly, an ongoing concern was how to make teaching a more central focus of the OAH, and just as important, how to build bridges between those who taught American history to the largest numbers of people—high school teachers and community college instructors—and the scholars at universities and colleges who were writing most of the American history books. Gerda Lerner, Mary Frances Berry and Linda Kerber all helped reinforce a philosophy of outreach, with programs like the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program providing a bridge to lay audiences.

This was also the period of time when jobs vanished for newly minted Ph.D.s, more and more historians became adjunct instructors, and jobs in community colleges became increasingly likely as the destination for history graduate students. At the same time, increasing attention went to what became amorphously called “public history”—state and municipal history programs, the National Park Service, libraries and documentation centers, with the OAH recognizing that it had not done an adequate enough job, in Kirkendall’s words, of reaching out “to teachers of American history at all levels. . .”

As Arnita Jones shows in her survey of the more recent history of the OAH, these issues have continued to be salient concerns. K-12 teaching, community colleges, the effort to improve the teaching of American history at all levels—these remained a focal point for the OAH in the 1980s and 1990s. Development of the OAH Magazine of History provided a critical vehicle for extending the insights and pedagogical experiences of OAH members to a constituency of teachers across the country at all levels. During Larry Levine’s presidency in the early 1990s, a task force on community colleges highlighted the urgent need to expand the OAH’s outreach to that constituency; and during my presidency in 1999, we restructured the executive board so that both community college and high school teachers would always be represented in the OAH’s decision-making structure.

These decades of change have clearly not been without travail and conflict—witness the attack by Lynne Cheney and others against Gary Nash and others who sought to establish more inclusive “History standards” for our schools; and the controversy over the “Enola Gay” exhibit at the Smithsonian around the decision to drop the atom bomb. But clearly, the OAH has chosen, in the tradition of Frederick Jackson Turner and others, to engage issues of national import and to reach out to ever growing constituencies of teachers and scholars.

Not surprisingly, many of the important issues of our past are still with us today. Who are we as historians? What is our role? Are we an inclusive organization that cares about all those who teach American history, or do we wish to limit ourselves to a constituency of college and university professors?

Although these issues are still with us, the history we heard at the centenary meeting in Minneapolis encourages us to believe that we can engage the current manifestations of these questions with a clear sense of being part of an evolving tradition of leadership that can help us move forward.