Meet Me in Seattle

Lee W. Formwalt

As I sit down at my computer to invite you to meet with us for our annual meeting in Seattle at the end of March, I am distracted by the snow flurries furiously being whipped up by the gusts of Arctic air blowing around Raintree House. It is below zero here in Bloomington, Indiana, in mid-January, and the thought of late March in the Pacific Northwest is refreshing. As I think about my last OAH convention as executive director, my mind wanders back nine years to my first convention in St. Louis. At that time, in 2000, we were deeply mired in the Adam’s Mark imbroglio. The U.S. Justice Department was suing Adam’s Mark for racial discrimination. We were not sure how to proceed—should we cancel our contract with the hotel at a cost to OAH of $425,000? Should we honor the contract, but hold a protest convention at the hotel? One thing we did decide early on was that we could not cancel the meeting. No matter what action we took regarding the hotel, we would still hold our annual convention and we would hold it in St. Louis. OAH President David Montgomery, in concluding his column in the February 2000 OAH Newsletter, said, “Let us hold a splendid convention in St. Louis and repudiate any revival of discrimination in the year 2000.”

The current economic crisis has cast a pall over the nation that is being felt by OAH and other nonprofits and learned societies. Membership numbers have dipped a percentage point from this time last year; our investments are down twenty-nine percent from last June; and contributions to the annual fall campaign are down forty percent. As Treasurer Bob Griffith has noted, the executive office has already tightened its belt. As we plan next year’s budget we are going to have to tighten it even further. But the work of OAH goes on. We continue to publish the finest scholarship in The Journal of American History, the best American history teaching ideas and practices in the OAH Magazine of History, and the latest news of the profession and the organization in the OAH Newsletter. And we continue to meet at our annual convention each spring.

The importance of the annual meeting hit home for me recently in New York City where I attended the AHA annual meeting, as I do every year the first weekend after New Year’s. Invariably, friends or acquaintances will come up to me at the AHA and ask, “Checking out the competition?” I chuckle at the persistence of this comment year in and year out. Like many of my OAH colleagues, I am also a member of AHA. And while I am always looking for ways to improve our operations by watching what others do, I go to the AHA primarily for the same reason many of you come to the OAH. It is that annual opportunity to meet and talk with and learn from others who do what you do—whether it is producing scholarship, teaching students, presenting history, running organizations, or some or all of these. The AHA brings together practitioners of all historical fields. At OAH we bring together all those who practice American history.

Some colleagues have questioned the need for annual meetings when travel funds are drying up and historians can share their work electronically without ever having to leave their desks. I would argue just the opposite. Yes, access to scholarship is better than ever. But as wonderful as e-mail and videoconferencing can be, there remains something artificial about that communication process. Many individuals who get teleconferenced into a meeting recognize right away the awkwardness of participating from afar. There is nothing like sitting around the table and experiencing your colleagues face to face. Body language speaks volumes that a disembodied voice will miss. And we all know how quickly an e-mail conversation can degenerate since it is easier to behave badly at the keyboard than when we talk face to face.

So, there is real value in coming together in person to discuss scholarship, enjoy fellowship, meet new colleagues, and network. American historians in Australia understand this. Last year, one Aussie Americanist flew to the States three times to attend the AHA, the OAH, and the Southern Historical Association annual meetings. Each one-way flight lasted eighteen hours. Many of our colleagues in the U.S. also spend much of their academic year in isolation from their fellow American historians. Before I took this job at OAH, I taught for two decades in a small state college in southwest Georgia. We had four historians in our department, but I was the only Americanist. Professional meetings, like the OAH, AHA, and Southern, were important in keeping me connected to the profession. In the OAH summer regional community college workshops, we met a number of American historians in one-person “departments.” The workshops helped slake their thirst for the intellectual exchange that happens when we gather in professional meetings.

Historians at large, well-funded, private universities and flagship state institutions also need the annual meeting. Sure, they have the luxury of a rich intellectual community of their peers in large history departments, but they often lack the contact with public historians, community college historians, and precollegiate teachers that happens at OAH conventions. I would like to think that we have moved down the road to dismantling the old traditional hierarchy of the profession with the elite research university historians at the top, the precollegiate teachers at the bottom, and the four-year and two-year college professors and public historians sandwiched in between.

In its place, OAH is building a collaborative community where all practitioners of American history work together to achieve its mission of promoting excellence in the scholarship, teaching, and presentation of American history. This year, Pete Daniel, the first public historian in memory to preside over the OAH, has chosen as his theme, History Without Boundaries. It is an admirable dream that we strive to realize. We are not there yet. But, while there are still boundaries that wall off parts of the profession, we are working hard to eliminate them. I urge you to come to Seattle and help us make the dream of History Without Boundaries a reality.

Scholars will find a smorgasbord of the latest research in a variety of American history fields. Teachers, both precollegiate and collegiate, will discover a rich selection of teaching sessions, as well as the annual Teaching American History Symposium. Community college historians have put together an important workshop at the start of the convention and public historians created a daylong workshop for anyone interested in oral history. A major plenary session on the opening night addresses “The 2008 Election as History.” A stellar panel—Clayborne Carson, Gil Troy, Fred L. Israel, and Blanche Wiesen Cook—will explore race, gender, polling, and the role of historians in the historic election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. On Friday afternoon, Ian Ruskin will present his highly acclaimed one-man multimedia play, From Wharf Rats to Lords of the Docks, on the life and times of labor leader Harry Bridges. We will wrap up our conference on Saturday with the OAH Awards Ceremony and Pete Daniel’s presidential address on “Tobacco Culture: Marion Post Wolcott’s FSA Photographs,” followed in the evening with our concluding presidential reception. We have created a tight three-day schedule, mindful of the fact that many of our East Coast colleagues need to board planes Sunday morning to make it back at a decent hour for their Monday classes.

At the OAH convention in Seattle you will find what is best about our profession—scholarship, teaching, presentation, and collegiality. Don't forget the many publishers and other exhibitors in the Exhibit Hall. And the coffee—you should have some of your memorable conversations over some of the best coffee the Pacific Northwest has to offer. I look forward to seeing you in Seattle. I will be there with President Pete Daniel, President-Elect Elaine Tyler May, Vice President David Hollinger, and the rest of the OAH leadership. Won’t you join us?