The National History Center

James M. Banner, Jr.

Although many OAH members may be aware of the National History Center, at the invitation of the editors at the OAH Newsletter, I want to offer to the entire OAH membership a short history of its development to date and a brief review of its aims and programs.

The idea for some kind of national, nonmembership institution for history linked to the American Historical Association originated in 1901 with J. Franklin Jameson, the great statesman of history of his generation. While Jameson never made fully clear the nature of the institution he had in mind, he seems to have envisaged a kind of institute for advanced historical study, one that would offer fellowships and seminars and undertake the many extraordinary endeavors that he himself soon set in motion within the Carnegie Institution of Washington and later the Library of Congress. While Jameson’s hopes for a new institution were not realized during his lifetime, they were periodically revived.

Being long aware of Jameson’s and Boyd’s initiatives, I exhumed their idea in 1999 and proposed something like it that year to the OAH and the AHA along with a suggestion that the two organizations appoint a joint committee to study it. The OAH declined my proposal, but the AHA, under incoming president Wm. Roger Louis, decided to consider it. By 2002, the institution was incorporated as the National History Center with its own board of directors. Critical to its founding and to its operations since 2002, the AHA took on the endeavor as a formal initiative and provided the center some support from its own budget. Since then, the center has grown beyond Jameson’s, Boyd’s, and my own early conception of it to have the makings of a broader, more useful, yet always professionally anchored institution of great promise.

From its founding, the center has taken as its guiding principle the aim of adding to the existing strengths of the discipline of history and of not duplicating any existing programs. It has also sought to undertake projects unlikely to fit comfortably within a membership organization and to respond quickly to opportunities that present themselves. It considers itself a convening institution—one that can bring together historians and organizations that may not normally work together toward common ends. And it confines its interests and programs to no particular subject of history nor to historians practicing in the United States. It is a national history center with international ends.

The center has tried to position itself in three large areas. The first of these is the application of historical knowledge to public understanding and debate. For instance, the center offers to members of Congress and their staffs a pioneering series of briefings (the first ever offered on a continuing basis to Congress by historians) on the historical context and previous history of matters of current congressional concern. In addition, on invitation from the Council on Foreign Relations, which is concerned about the decline of historical knowledge within its own precincts, the center is commissioning historians to offer lectures to the Council’s members. The center is also currently looking into ways to provide historians with training in writing and providing historical knowledge for the print and other media—again with the aim of increasing history’s salience to public affairs. It is our firm conviction that the discipline of history cannot remain a vital force in public life unless its practitioners more vigorously and inventively provide their fellow citizens with relevant historical knowledge.

Second, the center is trying to figure out how historians can most effectively intervene to improve the teaching of history in the nation’s schools. The center has commissioned a set of papers (eventually to be published) that the center hopes will provide guidance about specific ways in which professional historians—through research, instruction, and policy making—might strengthen history teaching. The center is providing the auspices for the preparation annually of nonpartisan policy papers about various aspects of history education—state-level history assessments being the first—in conjunction with the National History Education Clearinghouse. It has just completed a report, funded by the Teagle Foundation, on the undergraduate history curriculum. And with NEH funding, it has held a summer workshop for two- and four-year college teachers on putting American history into global perspective. Another will be held on American immigration in 2009. In all these projects, our purpose is to try to help historians regain some of the initiative in setting history education policy and the agendas for maintaining and strengthening history instruction in the nation’s schools.

Third, the center is devoting part of its efforts to advancing historical research and understanding in fresh ways. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellow Foundation, it has completed three of five annual month-long summer institutes for young scholars (both advanced graduate students and early-career academics) from around the world on the subject of decolonization. In this way, the center is in effect creating and advancing a new subject of historical scholarship. In addition, in conjunction with Oxford University Press, the center is sponsoring the publication of a series of books, under the general title “Reinterpreting History,” that will reveal to readers, both professional historians and members of the public, why and how historians compose and alter their interpretations of the past.

All of the center’s activities, administered by a staff of one and supported by a modest budget, represent only a fraction of what it ought, in the years ahead, to offer the international community of practicing historians. That promise, however, cannot be realized just by those currently involved in its governance and operations, nor should it be. Instead, the center ought to be thought of as the possession of all historians, its auspices available to any historian who can imagine how to use them, its growing capacities devoted to the discipline worldwide. In short, the center welcomes ideas and proposals from everyone.

None of the center’s early growth and programs could have been undertaken without the warm approval and generous support of an increasing number of historians, who together have contributed more than $620,000 toward the general operations.  Nor could it have moved so far ahead without the continuing support of the AHA, with which the center remains closely associated. We hope that the center will grow into an institution that will fulfill the hopes that Jameson and Boyd originally had for it. At least we can say that, at last, we have moved their great vision from idea to reality.

James M. Banner, Jr., treasurer of the National History Center <http://www.nationalhistorycenter.org>, is coeditor, with John R. Gillis, of Becoming Historians (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).