Unsung Heroes

Lee W. Formwalt

I have been reflecting on the last ten years as I wind down my term as executive director and one of the things that has struck me is how dependent OAH is on the voluntary efforts of our members. Many of them, along with the staff, are truly the unsung heroes of our organization.

Every year the staff mounts a major national convention in a different North American city, bringing together between 1,800 and 3,000 American historians to present and discuss the latest developments in scholarship, teaching, and the public presentation of U.S. history. Staff members are assisted by member volunteers on the program committee and the convention local resource committee. This year’s program committee for Seattle, ably led by Donald Ritchie and Leslie Brown, assembled a superb program. Working with them was a dynamic local resource committee, headed by Shirley Yee and Wilson O’Donnell, which helped arrange some fascinating tours and interesting offsite venues for sessions. Coordinating the efforts of the annual meeting program committee is Meetings Associate Jason Groth. Jason’s first contact with OAH came in a class I taught at Indiana University in 2000. He expressed an interest in serving as a volunteer intern. He worked out so well and everyone at OAH loved him, and soon he was a part-time and eventually full-time staff member. Today he works part-time and spends the rest of his time with his band traveling in Europe, Australia, and all over the U.S. When he is on the road, he stays connected with the program committee. Many times he answers committee members’ queries thousands of miles from the office, yet the committee assumes the response is coming from Bloomington.

At the annual meeting we learn the results of the hard work of more than seventy-five OAH volunteers who comprise our twenty-one prize committees. They read hundreds of books, articles, and dissertations, view a dozen or two historical films, and review a number of teacher portfolios before determining the best scholarship, films, and teachers of American history. Of course, reading the latest scholarship hot off the press is a benefit, but no one besides these prize committee members (and graduate students preparing for their exams) is expected to devour often more than fifty books in a period of several months.

Each quarter, the staff produces an issue of the Journal of American History, the OAH Magazine of History, and the OAH Newsletter. Each of these publications is advised by an editorial board (or an advisory board in the case of the Newsletter) comprising OAH member volunteersthirty in all. The superb content and professional appearance of each of these publications often goes without saying. But we need to pause on occasion and recognize the incredibly hard work of staff and volunteers in producing these quarterlies so valuable to our members.

Each quarter, OAH service committees meet, usually by conference call and face to face at the convention each spring, to carry out important OAH business relating to professional and membership matters. Coordinating this large undertaking, as well as the work of the prize committees, is OAH Committee Coordinator Kara Hamm. Ensuring that the committees are properly and completely appointed is the job of the relatively new eight-member Committee on Committees, all OAH volunteers, who present to the executive board each year a slate of more than fifty members recommended for its approval to fill various committee vacancies.

Each year, more than 300 OAH members volunteer for OAH committees, boards, and working groups, and I wish I could publicly thank each of them by name. Instead, I thought I would share some important examples of members who have gone above and beyond in their service, sometimes as an official appointee of a committee or board, and sometimes unofficially, without any public recognition. Over the last ten years, I have worked with more than fifty colleagues on the executive board. These leaders in the profession give of their time throughout the year, not just at the spring and fall board meetings. In some years, events develop that require much more time than any board member would anticipate. One of those years was my first2000when we faced the tough issue of whether we should meet in the Adam’s Mark Hotel, then being sued by the U.S. Justice Department for racial discrimination. E-mail flew fast and furious, but more important was the time we spent in conference calls on a number of evenings early that year. One of our board members, Jannelle Warren-Findley, was in Australia at the time. Despite the complications of time (it was actually the next morning down under), Jann was there on the line participating in our discussions and decision making. Not only did she impress me with her service from the other side of the world, but, as a public historian, Jann was instrumental in getting this new executive director to think of historians as “practicing” their craft in many different ways rather than just assuming that we all taught in some type of classroom.

My first official involvement as an OAH volunteer came when President-elect Linda Kerber appointed me to the OAH Membership Committee in 1996. This is OAH’s largest committee consisting of regional chairs and state chairs/cochairs. It has the never-ending job of working with the membership department to maintain and expand OAH membership. The current chair is Stephen Kneeshaw, who has served on the committee for fifteen years and also serves as the Midwest regional chair. Steve, who teaches at the College of the Ozarks, coordinates his fellow regional chairs to encourage them to motivate their state chairs. His work and that of his fellow committee members has contributed to OAH’s record growth in the last ten years.

One group of OAH volunteers who are very generous with their time and talents is the more than three hundred OAH Distinguished Lecturers. Coordinating this program is OAH staffer Annette Windhorn, who has grown this program from less than a hundred or so lecturers giving thirty lectures a year and generating $30,000 in revenue, to an effort that now generates $120,000 annually. Distinguished lecturers have given presentations in Alaska, California, Puerto Rico, Maine, and nearly every state in between. Not only do their talent and time go into preparing their lectures, but sometimes travel for their presentations involves nearly a day each way. In the last seven years, seven lecturersKim Phillips, Chana Kai Lee, James Loewen, Thomas Bender, Wilma King, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Athan Theoharishave each given three lectures within a fiscal year. Allida Black, who also represented OAH at the National Council for History Education, gave two Distinguished Lectures a year, two years in a row. Such generosity is overwhelming. We are also most grateful for the many hosts who invite OAH Distinguished Lecturers to their campus or facility. The most generous of these, without doubt, is OAH member Tim Westcott, who has hosted twenty-seven OAH lectures at Park University since 2002, and has two more booked for next year.

Over the years, OAH has striven to be the “big tent” for all practitioners of American history. In an effort to meet the needs of our precollegiate colleagues, we have improved the quality and appearance of our teaching publication, the OAH Magazine of History; we have enhanced our Focus on Teaching sessions at the annual meeting; and we have encouraged precollegiate teachers to participate in the OAH governance structure. Great examples of teachers who have served include Kathleen Kean of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, winner of the Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau Precollegiate Teaching Award and the Preserve America History Teacher of the Year Award given by the Gilder Lehrman Institute and Preserve America, who served on the OAH Executive Board; and Gideon Sanders of the Washington, D.C., public school system who has served on the Committee of Teaching and the OAH Magazine of History editorial board, and is working on the local resource committee for the 2010 annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Community college historians have also volunteered their time and talents for OAH. Juli Jones and Amy Kinsel have both served on the Community College Committee and the OAH Nominating Board. Juli became involved with the OAH/AHA Joint Committee on Part-Time and Adjunct Employment before she was hired to coordinate the highly successful OAH Community College Regional Workshop Program. Ken Alfers of Dallas, Texas, serves on the OAH Committee on Teaching and hosted the Dallas community college workshop at his campus, Mountain View College, last summer. And public historian Stephanie Grauman Wolf, who with her husband advised us on the community college workshop project, made one of the largest personal gifts in OAH history to support the program.

Although the number of precollegiate teachers has more than tripled in the last decade, due largely to the Teaching American History Grant program funded by Congress, the percentage of community college historians and historians of color remains stubbornly low. This is not due to lack of effort by staff and volunteers. Keith Berry, for example, is working to help grow the number of community college members by hosting the next community college workshop at his campus, Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida; and Felix Armfield of Buffalo State College, has persistently insured that the OAH annual meetings include sessions on historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). HBCU volunteers have participated in such sessions and worked to secure sponsorship for receptions honoring the role of HBCUs in the profession.

Not all of our unsung heroes are practitioners of American history. Some of our biggest supporters, like businessmen Jay Goodgold and Paul Sperry, and attorney Paul Martin Wolff, have not only made generous gifts, but have volunteered their time and talent on the OAH Leadership Advisory Council. Their love of history and of the OAH, like that of so many American historians, is manifested in their voluntary spirit.

OAH could not accomplish a fraction of what it does without the voluntary work of its unsung heroes. I have singled out a few here in this column, but there are many, many others. It is reassuring to know that their spirit and support will help insure the future prosperity of the Organization of American Historians.