On Giving an OAH
Distinguished Lecture

When I promised to do lectures for the OAH, I imagined that invitations would come through the lectureship program coordinator and the OAH website. Instead, I got my first call from Gerry Jones, an alumnus of my school, inviting me to talk about Theodore Roosevelt to his adult education class at Dartmouth College. Dartmouth’s Institute for Lifelong Education serves a wide array of adult learners, many of them Dartmouth grads, with offerings that range from Shakespeare to environmental history. My host told me that the students, mostly history buffs over age fifty, would have read my book, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life, so I prepared a talk geared to a small audience with a fair amount of knowledge about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

As I drove north to Dartmouth last fall, I recalled the many ways that the OAH has touched my life. I chaired my first professional panel at the Detroit OAH convention and found an agent to represent my book at the Atlanta convention. At so many conventions in years past, I have sat in sessions, taking notes about new research, and often have made new friends there as well. By browsing through the book exhibits, I had come up with years of teaching ideas for the U.S. survey, gender studies, and even Atlantic and world history courses. I got hired as a consultant for the National Park Service via the OAH and learned about a fascinating field: public history. The Journal of American History and the OAH Magazine of History have also helped me keep up with the latest research. Perhaps most important, the OAH has provided me with a good excuse to keep up with my dear friends in the profession over the decades. Raising money for the OAH is a small way to express my gratitude.

The drive from Andover to Dartmouth, along russet-leaf-bordered highways, also couldn’t have been a more welcome break from months of eight-hour days of archive-rummaging, researching a new book about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. The audience that awaited me in a rustic lodge on the edge of the Dartmouth campus proved to be larger than a single class. My host had invited the whole adult education program, swelling the audience to more than a hundred people.

I decided to speak more extemporaneously, following good advice given to me by Theodore Roosevelt’s great-grandson early in my book tour, and they proved to be a responsive audience. Most adult audiences know the TR basics and want to hear how he struggled to overcome asthma, racial prejudice, his early aristocratic biases, and a few of the limitations of his times. Labor history, the history of segregation, and even TR’s evolving foreign policy views were not entirely new to them. New Hampshire, in fact, had a lively Bull Moose campaign in 1912, and, lo and behold, some audience members raised their hands to recall Grandpa’s meeting with Teddy. Some of the women asked questions about how Edith Roosevelt made TR’s career possible. Our talk about history continued at the reception afterwards, and my host invited me to dine with a few students who had done term papers about TR.

After teaching or doing volunteer work with every age group, I confess to preferring to work with adults. As this Dartmouth event showed, you don’t have to spend a lot of time convincing a senior audience that history matters: they have lived it. So I had a grand time, and I was doubly happy to have my speaker’s fee go to the OAH, to which I owe so much. 

---