Happy Centennial Birthday, OAH!

Lee W. Formwalt

Like U.B. Phillips, I’ll “begin by discussing the weather.” Suffice it to say, the OAH Centennial Convention in Minneapolis escaped the snow that both preceded and followed it. The mid 50s temperatures were pleasant and Minneapolis’s noted “skyways” sheltered most of the 2,000 American historians who descended on the Twin Cities last month from the daily rain. Although there was much to see in downtown Minneapolis, there was plenty to keep OAH members busy inside the Hilton Hotel and the Convention Center.

As attendees descended the escalators to register for the annual meeting in the convention center, they encountered a continuously running display of a century of OAH leaders. Photographs of all but one of our one hundred presidents, as well as many of our treasurers, executive secretaries/directors, and Journal of American History editors were a visual reminder of how far we have come since our founding in 1907. Our largely white male Mississippi Valley Historical Association was transformed not only in name to the Organization of American Historians, but also in the diversity of its membership. Women comprise a third of our membership today, reflecting their numbers in the profession as a whole. Our presidents and executive and nominating boards are better at reflecting the diversity of American society in the last several decades than we did in our first three-quarters of a century. It was nice to be reminded of that.

A number of those presidents and other OAH leaders whom we saw in the photographs participated in the various centennial sessions sprinkled throughout the convention program. The highlight of those sessions came on Saturday night when seven former presidents—John Hope Franklin, Anne Firor Scott, Carl Degler, Leon Litwack, Mary Frances Berry, Eric Foner, and David Montgomery—reflected on their terms in office. It became very clear to anyone who did not know it before that the OAH presidency is not only an honor, but often a wearisome task. The most recent president on the panel, aside from moderator Richard White, was David Montgomery, who very vividly recreated the Adam’s Mark crisis, the central focus of his presidency. Sometimes the crises are internal, sometimes external, sometimes both. Eric Foner spoke as veteran of the celebrated culture war of the 1990s. But crises were only part of the story. The presidents also referred to the day to day operations that went on year in and year out and sang the praises of an inveterate and loyal OAH staff that collected the dues, sent out the Journal and produced and distributed the Newsletter and the Magazine of History.

One person who was not a president, not even a historian, whose influence was visible at the convention was Senator Robert C. Byrd. As OAH President Nell Irvin Painter noted, several of us traveled to Washington in early March to present him the OAH Friend of History Award. The Teaching American History Grant program that he created was the focus of our two-day preconference in Minneapolis. Well over a hundred teachers, professors, and others gathered to discuss the impact of the over one-half billion dollars in TAH grants on precollegiate American history teaching. This was our second annual TAH preconference and members are already clamoring for a third one next year at our annual meeting in New York.

While many of us are attending sessions, meeting with friends and colleagues, and taking advantage of the host city’s attractions, our volunteer leadership on the executive and nominating boards as well as the program committee are working very hard on governance and program matters. This year the executive board spent nearly a day discussing and voting on new amendments to the OAH Constitution. Our current constitution was written two decades ago and parts of it have been in need of change for some time. Several years ago the OAH president appointed an ad hoc committee on the constitution which worked closely with the executive office and executive board in reviewing the document. The committee recommended a number of changes, the executive board reviewed them and made some changes themselves. They now present this series of revisions to the membership for their approval. The ratification process begins with the mailing of this Newsletter. You will find a complete copy of the current constitution with recommended changes and deletions on pages 14-16. The constitution committee and the executive board recommended that the series of changes (many of them minor) be voted on as a package. We encourage all members to participate in this ratification process by voting electronically at <http://www.oah.org/members/vote/> or by paper ballot on the back page. A more detailed background and summary of the major changes can be found on page 14. To conform with current ratification procedures, we have provided clarifying information as well as the pros and cons for most changes. Please take your voting privileges seriously and cast your ballot by the September 1, 2007 deadline.

Let me conclude by reminding all our members of our Second Century Campaign, launched this centennial year. We have spent a good deal of time reflecting on our past century, but this is also the appropriate time to look ahead to our future and the problems and challenges that we face as a profession. Five years ago the executive board went on retreat to create a strategic plan based on our mission. That plan, which called for OAH to reach out to a broader audience beyond academe and to affect history education at all levels, was the basis for the three major areas of the OAH Second Century Initiative—precollegiate education, community colleges, and American history scholarship.

We have an ambitious $2 million goal for the Second Century Campaign. We want to raise one million dollars to further improve and expand the OAH Magazine of History. We have made significant progress in enhancing this teaching publication in the last five years and now more than 20 percent of our membership are precollegiate teachers who receive the Magazine as their primary publication. A million dollars will allow us to hire a full-time editor and get the Magazine into the hands of the 70,000 high school history and social studies teachers around the country. In the quiet phase of our campaign these past two years, we have raised $400,000 toward this goal.

The second area of our Second Century Initiative is community colleges. Most students who take the U.S. history survey at the college level do so at a community or two-year college. Yet, of our 9,500 members, less than 250 self-identify as community college historians. So there is a huge disconnect between the historians who do the most teaching of U.S. history at the college level and their profession. We have no illusions that we are going to solve this problem, but we must begin to address it. We want to raise $500,000 to hire a full-time community college coordinator who will organize two regional conferences for community college historians each summer in different parts of the country. Our first workshop will be at El Camino College in southern California in June. There, fifty community college historians will attend three days of sessions and public history tours that will address some of the areas that all teachers of the U.S. history survey face—the latest developments in U.S. history scholarship; teaching American history in a global context; teaching the second half of the twentieth century (including how one gets to the second half of the twentieth century!); and teaching underprepared students. In the quiet phase of the campaign, this project really resonated with the members I met with, and we have already raised nearly $300,000 for this project. Thirty of our members have each committed $5,000 or more over a five-year period to this effort.

The third major area that we hope to raise $500,000 for is the core area of American history scholarship. We hope to enhance technological innovation at our scholarly publication, the Journal of American History, and we hope to increase the sizes of our smaller awards for the best American history scholarship. Scholarship is at the core of what we do as a learned society and professional organization, and it is critical that we support it in any way that we can.

You should have received your letter from President Nell Painter and Leadership Advisory Cochairs Bill Chafe and Jay Goodgold. I ask you to seriously consider how you can help OAH as it looks ahead to the challenges of our profession in its Second Century. A pledge over the next several years is the best way.  Each gift is important, no matter what the size, but annual donors of larger amounts may also be eligible for the organization’s newest donor group, the new Millennium Ten Society. The Society recognizes donors who make a commitment of $10,000 with ten years to pay (i.e., $1,000 a year for 10 years). These gifts may be designated for the Second Century Campaign or otherwise are unrestricted in how they may be used. Our goal is 100 members committing a total of $1,000,000. So far we have six charter members of the Millennium Ten Society. If you wish to become a charter member, please contact OAH Development Director Susan Lyons at 812-855-7345 or at <slyons@oah.org>.  We hope to hear from you.