From "Bringing Us All Together" to "History Without Boundaries"

Lee W. Formwalt

Each year, the annual meeting allows over two thousand OAH members and others to come together and explore the complexity of our discipline and our profession. This craft we practice and this professional world in which we work is indeed complicated. This year in New York City, some 2,700 of us descended on Manhattan for our third largest meeting ever--exceeded only by Boston in 2004 and Washington in 1995. It has been twenty-two years since we last met in New York, and it was only the calamitous events of September 11, 2001, that allowed us to meet there once again. Simply put, New York is too expensive (with the average convention hotel room going for over $400 a night) for most of our members. In the aftermath of 9/11, the New York convention industry was suffering, and learned societies like ours had the opportunity to assist New York in its rebuilding while negotiating contracts for reasonably priced rooms.

Many of our members were eager to take advantage of our convening in New York City, and for the first time ever we sold out our room block at the convention hotel two months before the meeting. We scrambled to secure additional rooms and members grabbed them as soon as they became available. Before we boarded our planes for the Big Apple, we already had 2,200 people registered. The meeting plans were more complicated than usual as our convention overlapped with that of the much larger American Educational Research Association (AERA). Weeks before the meeting, OAH, AERA, and Hilton staff were negotiating the location of some of the last AERA and first OAH sessions. We also put together two joint sessions taking advantage of AERA's and OAH's common interest in education history.

Performing her last duty as OAH President, Nell Irvin Painter passes the gavel to her successor Pete Daniel at the 101st annual meeting in New York City, March 2008.

Nell Painter's theme for the New York meeting was "Bringing Us Together" and Pete Daniel's theme for next year's meeting in Seattle is "History Without Boundaries." In a sense, both these themes lead me to reflect on the nature of OAH, our mission, and our future. This comes at a time when the organization's governing body, the executive board, is studying the current strategic plan and considering what changes need to be made as we forge ahead into our second century as the international learned society and professional organization for American history.

Although membership in OAH has grown by a thousand over the last decade, it has leveled off at a little over 9,000. Some historians have argued that the growth of the large national and international associations have been limited by the proliferation of specialized organizations. In American history these include groups like the Southern Historical Association and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture that have been around a long time, as well as many relative newcomers like the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) and the Labor And Working Class History Association (LAWCHA). Some historians who join their specialized association forgo membership in OAH and AHA. I have never seen the specialized groups as competition for OAH and AHA. As an American historian, with research interests in southern and African American history, I maintain my membership in both OAH and AHA as well as in the Southern, ASALH, and several others. It is hard to imagine the specialized groups without the large umbrella groups.

Local Resource Committee Cochair Mark Naison, Fordham University, discusses using music to teach local history in the Bronx.

As the call for presentations for the OAH New York meeting put it, "Too often we lose sight of what brings our subjects and fields together, letting slip the opportunity of intellectual cross-fertilization." In New York, we talked "across lines, addressing larger issues as they manifest[ed] themselves in our subfields" and we explored "subfields and specialization, not in some relapsed American exceptionalism, but in an expansive spirit of unity." A good example of this were the joint OAH-AERA sessions. More important, was our success in breaching the walls of the Ivory Tower and connecting with the wider public.

Our well-attended and lively plenary session, "Storm Warnings: Rethinking 1968, 'The Year That Shook the World,'" got national attention in a preconvention story in U.S. News & World Report. The New York City Public School Exhibition Hall also got significant coverage in the New York Times in John Eligon's March 30, 2008, article, "Adding a Youthful Vibe to Historical Discourse." New Yorkers learned about OAH Local Resource Committee Cochair Mark Naison's efforts to bring the work of Bronx elementary students into the OAH convention. Naison observed that, "History is a place where people can carry on a discussion, which goes from the university to the community college to the high school to the elementary school, and all of these people can communicate with each other." A professor at Fordham University, Naison has worked with local schools in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, helping to teach the area's history through the music that is connected to its past.

While OAH President Pete Daniel looks on, Brown University President Ruth Simmons received the 2008 OAH Friend of History Award for her creation in 2004 of the Committee on Slavery and Justice at Brown University.

From "Bringing Us All Together" in New York, we now set our sights on the Pacific Northwest. In Seattle, next March, we will explore "History Without Boundaries," a theme that will "highlight the creative use of history in research, education, the media, and public presentations." The 2009 program committee spent much of their time at the New York convention working hard to pull together an eclectic program from the numerous session proposals they received and the sessions they created themselves.

In Seattle, as in most OAH efforts, we will witness the centrality of scholarship to what we do. The OAH would not be the OAH without its flagship scholarly journal, published each quarter under the able leadership of Journal of American History Editor Ed Linenthal. But even that impeccable example of world-class scholarship recognizes the importance of going beyond the shelves of research libraries and the bookshelves of OAH members. An excellent example of the new and creative ways to make scholarship available and useful to a wider audience was the December 2007 special issue of the JAH, "Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue." The JAH not only showed how important it is to connect the past to the present, but they created a companion online project accessible literally around the world. Like the New York convention, the Katrina issue of the JAH crossed boundaries, based as it was on a multidisciplinary conference held in March 2007 in Mobile, Alabama.

David Thelen received the 2008 Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award for his transformation of the Journal of American History, wich he edited from 1985 to 1999.

Shortly after returning from the New York convention, I had an opportunity to witness an important example of how a professional historian can make a difference by reaching beyond the discipline to the wider world. The president of OAH and I get invited to a dozen or more university presidential inaugurations each year. We usually ask an OAH member at the college or university to represent OAH in the long line of delegates of academic institutions, learned societies, and educational and professional organizations. But this time I was invited to the inauguration of OAH executive board member Ed Ayers as president of the University of Richmond. And part of the inaugural celebration was a symposium on "New Perspectives on the American Civil War" that included Ayers, former OAH Executive Board member and Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, and OAH Distinguished Lecturer Gary Gallagher. It was a honor and a privilege to represent OAH, and I made my way to Richmond last month.

At the symposium, I found myself seated among bankers, lawyers, businessmen, and alumni, all eager to hear what their new president and his colleagues had to say about the Civil War. One could not forget that this was Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, with its enduring celebration of the Old South and the Civil War. Anyone who knows Ed, Drew, and Gary, or read their work, knows that they do not disappoint. That day I saw a group of wealthy and influential persons experience the presentation of sound scholarly history in a very accessible way. I have seen this many times at scholarly conferences, but I doubt the people I was sitting with had often witnessed such presentations.

For the next day's ceremony, I was seated next to Noralee Frankel, representing the AHA. Neither one of us was sure what our colleague would say in his inaugural address. What we heard was an amazing reaffirmation of the importance and power of history. It was a moving account of the importance of the university's history, but more importantly, it was a courageous account that stated clearly the role of race in the institution's past. Presidents are often expected to be cheerleaders for their university focusing on all that is good. What a pleasure it was to see a historian president tell his faculty, students, alumni, and local supporters the good and the not so pretty parts of his institution's past.

Historian Edward L. Ayers delivers his inaugural address as president of the University of Rirchmond: "Our history holds the seeds of what we can be, of what we can do, of what we can dream." (Photo courtesy of the University of Richmond)

There was much to celebrate, and Ed Ayers celebrated all that was good in the University of Richmond's past. It made me proud of my profession as I heard him say, "More often it is easy to forget about history, swept up as we are in today and tomorrow. But our history holds the seeds of what we can be, of what we can do, of what we can dream. Let's remind ourselves how we got here today." He then recounted how a group of committed Baptists created Richmond College, how the school lost everything fighting for the Confederacy, and how it came back to life and joined with a new Baptist women's college and built a new campus. He brought the story of growth and expansion up to the present and noted that he had outlined "the history of the University of Richmond we know best. That history is marked by constant change and continual progress. That history is compelling and it is ours."

"But it is not the only history we inhabit. . . ." Ed went on to talk about less well-known dimensions of the university's history--how the first president of Richmond College, a slaveholder, also pastored a 2,000-member African American church in Richmond and opened a school for freedpeople in Richmond after the war; how the college welcomed Jewish students when other colleges maintained quotas or excluded them altogether; and how the university welcomed students from China, Brazil, Norway, Lebanon, and other places around the world. "But, closer to home, the fundamental unity and equality of people had long been denied. Although the Baptists had identified themselves early in their history as enemies of slavery, they, like virtually all other white Southerners, had accommodated themselves to the institution by the time Richmond College was founded. For a hundred years after emancipation, for five generations, the city, state, and region where we live demanded racial exclusion." He then went on to tell the painful history of racism at the university and the slow progress that began to be made in the 1960s.

Ed Ayers represents the best of what our profession has to offer the world. We can tell the truth about the past and still be optimistic about the future. For the past is not all good or bad. What historians can do and what OAH can encourage is to take that knowledge we have based on sound scholarship and share it with the rest of the world. Our mission--to promote excellence in the scholarship, teaching, and presentation of American history--carries us far beyond the university classroom. It brings us to community colleges where more American history is taught than in all other institutions of higher education; it brings us to high schools and middle schools; to historical parks and museums; to corporate and government offices; and to the reading and viewing public. It's a big mission, it's an important job, and it's both the legacy and the future of the OAH.