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February 09, 2010

Online Oral History Projects, Part II

By Jessica Pritchard

Note: AHA Today has featured oral history in numerous past blog posts. This post along with the previous February 3rd post roundup some of these previously mentioned oral history resources as well as introducing some new sources.

Much like podcasts, oral history projects seem to be growing by the week, covering countless historical eras and events. Last week we ran a post introducing a few of these online oral history resources, and today we survey more of these projects.

Suffragists Oral History Project
Suffragists Oral History ProjectThis project started in the early 1970s as a part of the Bancroft Library’s Regional Oral History Office, interviewing 12 notable figures from the women’s suffrage movement. Most of these women were born in the 1860s through the 1890s. They shared their experiences during the fight for women’s right to vote, and many of them extended their “careers as leaders of the movements for welfare and labor reform, world peace, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.”

The following snippets are taken directly from the project’s web site:

Sherna Gluck, director of the Feminist History Research Project, conducted the remaining five interviews, capturing the passion and conviction behind these suffragists’ fight for equal voting rights.

May 4 Oral History Project
Kent State Oral HistorySandra Perlman Halem created the May 4 Oral History Project in 1990 to preserve the memories of those who were witness to and participated in the student demonstration gone awry at Kent State University in 1970. The demonstration was in response to President Richard Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia, thereby expanding the Vietnam War. The protests began on Friday, May 1st, one day after the invasion became public knowledge; however, the protests grew unruly, with confrontation breaking out between protestors and police, resulting in the Ohio National Guard being called to monitor and control the protests. Unfortunately, the National Guard opened fire on the crowd of protestors, leaving four dead, one permanently paralyzed, and eight wounded.

This project includes “accounts by eyewitnesses as well as a wide variety of viewpoints: Kent State alumni, faculty, staff and administrators who were on campus that day; residents of the city of Kent; National Guardsmen; campus and city police; hospital personnel; and other persons whose lives were affected by these historic events.”

The Rutgers Oral History Archives
The Rutgers University oral history archives features stories from alumni and New Jersey residents who fought in World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and Vietnam. The site allows users to search for interviews based around the following indexes: alphabetically, by Rutgers class year, by war, by military branch, by military unit, by medals. The site also features a special topics section with interviews from those who were interned by the Japanese, Germans, other forces, and neutral powers.

Rutgers Oral History Archives

The Chicago Architects Oral History Project
The Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Architecture created the Chicago Architect’s Oral History Project in 1983 to capture stories from the people who participated in the city’s architectural beginnings, from the early 20th-century through today. These oral histories are meant not only to document the past, but also to “explore motivations and influences, behind-the-scenes stories, and personal reflections.” Each oral history contains an interview transcript and mini biography. By sharing their stories about their individual journeys to architecture, they in turn recount international histories, as many of these architects originate from other countries.

Chicago Architects Oral History

Iranian Oral History Project
This oral history project from Harvard features interviews from 118 witnesses to and participants in political happenings in Iran from the 1920s to the 1980s, many of which include personal accounts from political leaders.

Harvard Iranian Oral History Project

Check back for future oral history related posts, read some of our previous coverage (country music, Story Corps, and more), and let us know in the comments of other resources in this area that you’ve found valuable.

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February 08, 2010

AHA Joins Coalition on the Academic Workforce Call for Fair and Equitable Treatment of All Faculty

By Robert B. Townsend

CAW One Faculty Serving All StudentsAt its January meeting, the AHA Council endorsed a new study from the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) that calls on college and university faculty and administrators to assure that all teachers at their institutions are treated as professionals. Representing a consensus of 15 disciplinary and professional associations, the report concludes that “[i]f we are to maintain a world-class system of higher education and help all students achieve success, we must have a strong faculty with the support necessary to carry out its professional responsibilities.”

Citing the long term decline in the proportion of college and university faculty in full-time tenure-track positions, the “One Faculty Serving All Students” issue brief calls for reducing reliance on faculty employed in short-term appointments while improving the compensation and benefits of contingent faculty. The brief maintains that all faculty members should earn salaries and support commensurate with their professional status, and that administrators and faculty should be proactive in gathering information about staffing in their departments and institutions so they can better advocate for improved employment practices.

These recommendations may seem a bit unrealistic, given the current fiscal crisis in higher education, but the members of the coalition believe that the time to think about these issues is now. Assuming the financial squeeze will begin to dissipate in the next few years, departments will need to be positioned to assure that faculty lost due to attrition and hiring freezes over the past two years are replaced by fairly compensated tenure-line faculty.

The members of the AHA Council endorsed these principles, but also called on history departments to follow the more specific (and in some case, more rigorous) policies approved in the Standards for the Use of Part-time and Adjunct Faculty endorsed by the AHA Council in 2003.

The Association continues to monitor these issues as part of its regular data collection efforts, while supporting the multidisciplinary advocacy efforts of the CAW.

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February 05, 2010

Grant of the Week: NY Public Library Short-term Research Fellowships

The New York Public Library is offering up to ten short-term research fellowships to support visiting scholars pursuing research in the library’s Dorot Jewish Division; Manuscripts and Archives Division; Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs; or the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. Fellowships will range from $2,500–$3,000. See the fellowships page for more information on the library’s divisions and how to apply for the award. Applications due by April 1, 2010.

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February 04, 2010

What We’re Reading: February 4, 2010 Edition

A History of the World - BBC and the British MuseumIn our roundup this week we have links to a look back on the life of Howard Zinn, news of a new children’s history museum, steps to open a Ulysses S. Grant library, a request for input from the National Archives, a look at combining history and video games, and new evidence in the history of surgery. Then, some digital history: the BBC and British museum join forces in a podcast, Priya Chhaya describes “Historian 2.0,” a blog series about the digital archives of every state continues, and the University of Chicago Press releases this month’s free e-book. Next, explore aerial images of New York from the 1920s, images from National Archives now in Flickr, and a story from NPR on a 1848 image of Phineas Gage. Finally, we finish up with a few links just for fun: Holden Caulfield’s A People’s History of the United States, a quiz on your knowledge of the 220 State of the Union addresses, a snarky 1905 letter from Mark Twain, and a look at currency across time and place.

Digital History

Images

For Fun

Contributors: David Darlington, Elisabeth Grant, Vernon Horn, Arnita Jones, Jessica Pritchard, and Robert B. Townsend

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February 03, 2010

Online Oral History Projects

By Jessica Pritchard

Note: AHA Today has featured oral history in numerous past blog posts. This post along with an upcoming post roundup some of these previously mentioned oral history resources as well as introducing some new sources. 

Most of us grew up listening to stories—stories from our parents, our grandparents, our aunts and uncles, even our childhood friends on the playground. Oral history, a systematic form of storytelling that serves as a means of historic preservation, is one of the elements that makes the study of history exciting and engaging, offering a window into firsthand accounts of the past.

However, oral history goes beyond simply storytelling. In her article, What is Oral History, Linda Shopes says, “Oral history might be understood as a self-conscious, disciplined conversation between two people about some aspect of the past considered by them to be of historical significance and intentionally recorded for the record.” In many ways, oral history democratizes the past by complimenting the written record with an oral one.

Furthermore, our digital culture has spoiled us with digital archives from around the world, existing no further than a mouse-click away. Many museums, historical organizations, universities, and special interest groups have not only created digital archives, but also oral history projects that cover spectrums of historical themes.

The following sites offer a look into the expansive realm of online oral history projects.

Centre of South Asian Studies
Oral history Centre of South Asian StudiesBranching from the University of Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies, this oral history collection includes more than 300 interviews recorded during the 1960s and 70s in hopes of archiving and preserving memories from those who witnessed Indian independence and the final days of British colonial authority. The site explains, “Alongside the campaigners, freedom-fighters, and assassins, ordinary people such as doctors, missionaries, farmers, and police officers give intimate reminiscences of Empire, Indian independence, and of partition.”

U.S. Latino and Latina World War II
U.S. Latina Somewhere between 250,000 and 750,000 Latinos and Latinas served in World War II. The number is hard to nail down concretely since the military papers from the era classified Latinos and Latinas as either white, Mexican, or N/A. In attempts to “foster a greater awareness of their [U.S. Latinos and Latinas] contributions” during the war, the site offers hundreds of stories and photographs documenting these contributions. These stories, many of which have been forgotten, recount experiences both during the war and after, especially since many veterans returned home to segregated communities. The project has interviewed more than 500 Latinos and Latinas since the spring of 1999.

Users can also explore Spotlight stories or browse stories alphabetically, by military wartime locale, by city of birth, by state of birth, or by branch of service. The site even offers literature on how to conduct oral history interviews, including various videos and a training kit. Users can also peruse an extensive list of resources centering on World War II, archiving practices, and Latino history.

U.S. House of Representatives
Oral History U.S. House of PrepresentativesWith the approval of the first oral history program for the U.S. House of Representatives by the Office of the Clerk in 2004, users can now access stories from the House, not only from members, but also member aides, committee staff, support staff, technical assistants, and member’s family. The Office of History and Preservation (OHP) conducted these interviews and made electronic copies of the transcripts and summaries available to the public. Each interview includes “detailed descriptions of legislative processes and procedures, personal and political anecdotes, and recollections about the evolving nature of the institution, represent a vital source of information about the inner workings of Congress.” In addition to scrolling through interviews, users can also search for interviews based around historic events pulled from each interview, ranging from the Bonus March of 1932 to changes in Capitol security in the 20th century.

The site also offers teaching resources, including a lesson plan, House History Comes Alive [PDF]; online resources that link to other digital historical databases; and teaching tips.

Presidential Oral History Program
Presidential Oral History ProgramThe Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia started the Presidential Oral History Program in 1981. As with many other oral history projects, this program seeks to provide the means to preserve history, explaining, “Too often in the past, what they have to teach has been lost for lack of means to record it while they lived. The Presidential Oral History Program is a public service endeavor to provide such means and to preserve the true voices of past presidencies for posterity.” However, unlike other oral history projects, the Miller Center interviews groups of people involved in an administration, pooling together their memories of specific activities and issues to make a more complete historical record.

Currently, the site contains interviews from the following presidential administrations: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and William Clinton. In addition to covering presidential administrations, the site has also conducted interviews centering on key players in political history, including Edward Kennedy and Lloyd Cutler, and key events, including the Falklands War Roundtable and the White House Congressional Affairs Symposium.

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February 02, 2010

Heroic AHA Member Helps to Save Lives in Haiti

By Pillarisetti Sudhir

James CollDwelling as they usually do in dark and dusty archives or hallowed halls of academe, historians are not often linked to deeds of derring-do and bravery. But AHA member James Coll was recently in Haiti after the devastating earthquake there, and helped to save at least six lives, it has been reported.

Coll, an adjunct professor of history and social sciences at the Nassau County Community College and the Suffolk County Community College (both in New York State), and who also works as a detective in the New York Police Department’s elite emergency squad, was a part of the 40-member emergency rescue team that went from the NYPD to Haiti after the earthquake. As a member of a special, hand-picked rescue team, Coll helped to search through the rubble, and the team was able to rescue a few of those trapped underneath the dangerous debris.

Facing danger to rescue people is nothing new to Coll. He was in the NYPD team that went to help when the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549 did an emergency landing on the Hudson River on January 15, 2009 (which we mentioned in the September 2009 Members column of Perspectives on History). For that display of bravery and altruism in the line of duty, he was presented with a certificate of honor by New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and the CEO of US Airways, Doug Parker.

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February 01, 2010

The Special Collections of the National Agricultural Library

By Elisabeth Grant

The Special Collections of the USDA’ National Agricultural Library (NAL) offer agricultural historians, and those with similar interests, access to “rare books, manuscript collections, nursery and seed trade catalogs, photographs, and posters from the 1500s to the present.” Visit the library 8:30 am to 4:30 pm (or the Special Collections 8:30 am to 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm) Monday through Friday at the National Agricultural Library’s Abraham Lincoln Building in Beltsville, Maryland.

But, before you make the trip, see what all the National Agricultural Library’s Special Collection has to offer online. Below we highlight just a few sections feature on the NAL’s Special Collections web site:

Rare Books
In the Special Collections’ Rare Books Collection online find digitized images from works like the 1797 The Natural History of the Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia, the 1817 American Medical Botany, the 1848 Tokaido Gojusan-eki Hachiyama Edyu and more. The NAL web site explains that the rare book collection “is strong in a number of agricultural sciences and includes works by many great herbalists, as well as renowned works on flowers and fruits from both the 18th and 19th centuries.”

Rare books

Nursery and Seed Trade Catalogs
In the Nursery and Seed Trade Catalogs section of the Special Collections site are a selection of digitized covers from the over 200,000 NAL has in its collection. These catalogs date back to the late 1700s but most in the collection are from the 1890s on.

Manual of Everything for the Garden, 1885

Thomas Jefferson Correspondence Collection
The Thomas Jefferson Correspondence Collection contains scanned in copies of letters (accompanied by transcripts) spanning 1786 to 1819. Topics within the letters include correspondence with agricultural offices, details on seed purchases, Jefferson’s invention of a plough attachment and more.

Jefferson Letter 1819

USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection
In the Pomological Watercolor Collection find illustrations used in pomology, “the science of fruit breeding and production.” The USDA’s Division of Pomology was created in 1886 “to oversee the collection and distribution of new varieties of fruits, and to disseminate information to fruit growers and breeders. “

Apples from the USDA Pmological Watercolor Collection

More
Above are just a few sections within the National Agricultural Library’s collections. Visit their main site  and their special collections for even more resources.

Volunteer Opportunities
Interested in working with historic materials? The National Agricultural Library offers student internships (PDF) and volunteer opportunities in its Special Collections. Both options allow participants to “handle and organize primary source materials, including manuscripts, rare books, photographs, posters, and artifacts.”

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January 29, 2010

Grant of the Week: Summer Seminars in American History from the Gilder Lehrman Institute

K-12 history, social studies and English teachers are invited to apply to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 2010 Summer Seminars. Taught by renowned historians on college campuses in the US and the UK, these one-week seminars give educators the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of topics in American history—while gaining practical resources and strategies to take back to the their classrooms.  For a list of all thirty-nine seminars, information about full and partial fellowships, graduate credit, and to apply online, visit the Summer Seminars for Teachers page online.

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January 28, 2010

Howard Zinn, Paradigmatic People’s Historian, Dies at 87

By Pillarisetti Sudhir

Howard Zinn, the historian who translated his pioneering vision of the past—seeing it from the perspective of ordinary people—into progressive and radical political action, died of a heart attack on Wednesday, January 27, 2010, at the age of 87.

In his most famous book, A People’s History of the United States, Zinn sought to answer as it were, Bertolt Brecht’s “Questions from a Worker Who Reads,” for the United States, taking the view that the past needed to be understood from the viewpoint of ordinary people. Living up to its title not just in its inspiring retelling of what had been until then a master’s narrative, but even in its lucid and accessible style, the book, more than a million copies of which were sold, compelled readers to look at American history in an entirely different way, and became a paradigm for historians in many lands.

In one sense, Howard Zinn was the archetypal “worker who reads,” born as he was to working-class parents (his immigrant father, Edward, was a waiter, and his mother, Jennie, was a homemaker, as the obituary notice in the Boston Globe records). He himself worked in various menial jobs after he had served as a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force during the Second World War. But he took advantage of the GI Bill to get a degree from New York University and then went on to get his MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University. His dissertation, which received an honorable mention in the 1958 competition for the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association, was published for the AHA as LaGuardia in Congress by Cornell University Press. That first book already showed Zinn’s intellectual concern for the people without a presence in the traditional history books and presaged his lifelong commitment to constructing a new narrative about the past from a progressive perspective. As Zinn put it, it was the “obscure and ordinary people, farmers and small businessmen, white-collar workers and manual laborers, who beheld the glittering spectacle [of the Gilded Age] but were never quite part of it,” that people like LaGuardia were concerned about, and Zinn himself came to focus upon.

Zinn began his teaching career at Upsala College and Brooklyn College before moving to Spelman College in Atlanta, where he inspired generations of students including such distinguished alumni as Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman.

As Eric Foner, the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and a former president of the AHA, put it in an e-mail message today, “Over the years I have been struck by how many excellent students of history had their interest in studying the past sparked by reading Howard Zinn.  That’s the highest compliment one can offer to a historian.”

Perhaps because of his new reading of American history, his own humane worldview, and his belief that a historian cannot ignore his or her civic responsibilities as a citizen, Zinn became an activist, first in the civil rights campaign (during which he served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and then in the protests against the Vietnam War.

Zinn eloquently expressed his views about the historian as a citizen in an exchange with AHA President John K. Fairbank in the pages of the AHA’s newsletter following a dramatic business meeting in which Zinn had introduced a resolution against the war in Vietnam (described in the February 2010 issue of Perspectives online): “If all Americans, in all the thousands of assemblies that take place through the year, insist on keeping out of politics because neither war nor racial persecution nor poisonous vapors coming in through the library window, affect them as historians, chiropodists, clerks, or carpenters—then “pluralist” democracy is a facade for oligarchical rule.”

From Spelman College, Zinn moved to the political science department at Boston University, where he continued to inspire and mentor countless numbers of students (his classes sometimes had hundreds enrolled) with his teaching and his activism. Even after he took early retirement from the university in 1988, Zinn kept speaking and writing about the issues that were at the heart of his political self, which, for him, was never separate from his intellectual being. He produced a series of books, including the autobiographical You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times; Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order; Declarations of Independence; three plays, Emma (about Emma Goldman), Marx in Soho, and Daughter of Venus; and different editions of People’s History, of which the most recent was a graphic book version. He was also a prolific writer of essays, some of which have been collected into anthologies.

Zinn was expected to be at the AHA’s 121st annual meeting held in January 2007 in Atlanta, to chair a session that was titled —most appropriately for him—“The Historian in a Time of Crisis: Staughton Lynd, Yale University, and the Vietnam War.” Unfortunately he could not come to the meeting because of the illness of his wife, Roslyn. (She died in 2008.) Zinn had agreed to take part in a panel being organized by Carl Mirra and Staughton Lynd for the AHA’s 2011 annual meeting in Boston, but which, if included in the program, must now be bereft of Zinn’s iconic presence.

Just a few months before his death, Zinn appeared in a History Channel production, The People Speak, in which film, stage, and TV personalities read and performed extracts from his work or other related pieces and thus paid tribute to a historian who crossed the traditional boundaries of his discipline and perhaps even of his profession, to set an example that will always remain impossible to emulate. He was truly a historian of the people and for the people.

—Based on information in the AHA office, the Boston Globe obituary notice, and the web site, www.howardzinn.org.

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January 28, 2010

What We’re Reading: January 28, 2010 Edition

Blue Shield HaitiTo begin this week the National Coalition for History has news of recent appointments at the National Council on the Humanities and the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center. Then, we send you to two places on Haiti: Blue Shield’s call for saving Haiti’s cultural heritage and a New York Times op-ed on Haiti’s history. We also report two deaths this week, historians Howard Zinn and Louis R. Harlan. Read two interviews as well, one from AHA President-elect Tony Grafton and the other from an associate professor at Elon University. Finally, we look to topics on History Day, sharing faculty positions, Business’s need for the Liberal Arts, the ethics of oral history, and the Harry Houdini Collection.

News

Haiti

Deaths

Interviews

Articles

Contributors:  Noralee Frankel, Elisabeth Grant, Vernon Horn, Arnita Jones, and Robert B. Townsend

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January 27, 2010

The Half Had Not Been Told to Me: African Americans on Lafayette Square

By Jessica Pritchard

Lafayette SquareBecause of its proximity to the White House, Lafayette Square is often called America’s front yard. Presented by the Decatur House Museum and endorsed by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the ”Half Had Not Been Told to Me” online digital tour focuses on African American history in Lafayette Square during the 19th and 20th centuries. The site explains, “By exploring the African American history of Lafayette Square, you can begin to reveal a partially obscured treasure and discover the ‘half had not been told me,’ just as Frederick Douglass did when he encountered the Freedman’s Bank on the Square.”

The site’s functions are multifold. The resources available can be used as a springboard for teachers in creating lesson plans or as a supplement for already existent lesson plans. In addition to aiding teachers, the website also expands general knowledge on the history of the Square.

The site offers two options for exploring Lafayette Square’s historic buildings. First, you can take a digital tour of these buildings, reading and listening to the history of each, as well as perusing primary resources. If you happen to find yourself in Lafayette Square on a trip to Washington, D.C., take a cell phone audio tour using Guide by Cell technology, which allows you to call individual phone numbers for each historic building and listen to a tour narrated by the city’s mayor, Adrian Fenty.

How you take the tour is entirely up to you, but the following links give scaffolding to the history surrounding Lafayette Square.

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January 25, 2010

Louis R. Harlan, former president of the AHA, dies January 22, 2010

Louis R. HarlanLouis R. Harlan, historian, former AHA president, and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Maryland, College Park, passed away this past Friday, January 22, 2010 after a long illness. He was 87. Below we reprint the biography marking his presidential address from the 1989 AHA General Meeting booklet. Look to a future issue of Perspectives on History for an expanded remembrance.

Louis R. Harlan, president of the American Historical Association, has the distinct honor of serving as president or president-elect of the three major historical associations in the United States, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. Professor Harlan becomes the fifth president of the American Historical Association to achieve this special honor. The others were John Hope Franklin, C. Vann Woodward, Carl N. Degler, and Arthur S. Link. He is, however, the only individual to hold all three positions at the same time.

Harlan was born in West Point, Mississippi, in 1922 and grew up in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. He enlisted in the Navy in 1942, but was able to complete his B.A. degree at Emory University before entering midshipman’s school in 1943. He took part in the invasions of Normandy and southern France, as an officer on an infantry landing craft. When the war in Europe ended Harlan was at Eniwetok poised for the invasion of Japan.

After the war he attended graduate school at Vanderbilt University, earning a Master’s degree in 1948. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in 1955 at The Johns Hopkins University, where he studied under a brilliant young scholar, C. Vann Woodward, who at the time had one book to his credit, his biography of Tom Watson. At one of Woodward’s seminars the guest lecturer was a young scholar from Howard University, John Hope Franklin, who influenced Harlan’s decision to devote his career to race relations and southern history. During his years at Hopkins, Louis Harlan discovered Booker T. Washington. While researching his doctoral dissertation Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901-1915, he was among the first to use the vast collection of Washington’s papers at the Library of Congress. But it would be a decade before he returned to the Washington manuscripts. From 1950 to 1959 he taught at East Texas State College then moved to the University of Cincinnati, where he taught from 1959 to 1965.

In 1966 he accepted a full professorship at the University of Maryland and began systematically researching and writing about the career of Booker T. Washington. His prodigious scholarship as a historian, documentary editor, and biographer resulted in numerous articles on aspects of Washington’s career in the major historical journals, a fourteen-volume documentary series, coedited with Raymond W. Smock, The Booker T. Washington Papers (1972-88), and a two-volume biography Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (1972) and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (1983). The fIrst volume of the biography won the prestigious Bancroft Award. The second volume won another Bancroft Award, the Albert J. Beveridge Award in American History of the American Historical Association, and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1984. Harlan’s essays on Washington, spanning twenty-five years of research, have been published as Booker T. Washington in Perspective: The Essays of Louis R. Harlan (1989).

During his career Louis Harlan has been the recipient of many honors and awards including an ACLS fellowship (1964) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975). He was a Fellow in Residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California, in 1980-81. His public service includes board membership on chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union in Cincinnati and Montgomery County, Maryland. He was a member of the Maryland State Commission on Afro-American History and Culture from 1968 to 1985. He was one of the Organization of American Historians’ appointees to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission from 1984 to 1988.

Since 1985 Louis Harlan has held the title of Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. The distinguished professor designation at Maryland is held by five faculty members in all departments. He is currently writing a memoir of his experiences aboard ship during World War II.

- Biography from the 1989 AHA General Meeting booklet, when Louis R. Harlan gave his presidential address.

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January 25, 2010

Perspectives on History – January 2010

By Elisabeth Grant

Perspectives on History - January 2010The January 2010 issue of Perspectives on History begins with new AHA president Barbara D. Metcalf’s inaugural “From the President” article: “Doing History for Life.” In it she considers how one continues doing history after retirement.  She looks to examples of historians who’ve gone on to study in new fields, teach to new types of students, travel to new locations, or take up new roles (like the president of a certain historical association).

History Job Market
The state of the history job market was a popular, though not always positive, topic at the recent 124th Annual Meeting. Read two articles from Robert B. Townsend on the job market and history PhDs.

AHA News
In AHA News, even as the new council members are announced, we’re gearing up for the next election. And speaking of looking ahead, make sure to submit your proposal for the 125th annual meeting (deadline February 15, 2010). In this issue we also recognize the generosity of the 2009 contributing members, and consider a new online project: a “History Syllabus Wiki.”

From the NCH and the NHC
We hear from both the National Coalition for History (NCH) and the National History Center (NHC) this month. From the NCH: the “Obama Administration Issues Sweeping Open Government Directive” and other news briefs. And from the NHC, news that they’ve received $1.457 million from the Mellon Foundation and are working on a new seminar series.

More Articles
Three more articles cover the topics of economic history, Teaching American History grants, and ethics for historians:

Letters to the Editor and In Memoriam
Finally, the January issue wraps up with one letter to the editor on the importance of learning a language and Edmund Clingan’s remembrance of Jo Ann Kay McNamara.

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January 22, 2010

Grant of the Week: Cuban Heritage Collection of UMiami Libraries Fellowship Program

The Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami is proud to launch a new Cuban Heritage Collection Fellowships Program that is available to graduate students. Both exploratory pre-prospectus and dissertation research fellowships are available. The deadline for sending in application materials is on February 19, 2010. For more information and instructions on how to apply see the Fellowships page online.

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January 21, 2010

What We’re Reading: January 21, 2010 Edition

Ben Fry visualization of Darwin's On the Origin of SpeciesIt’s been a few weeks since a regular What We’re Reading post has gone up, due to the schedule around the recent 2010 annual meeting. But we’re back, with a number of links collected throughout this month. We start with some newsy items, including coverage of the participation of historians George Chauncey and Nancy Cott in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger trial, a look at Haiti’s tumultuous history, the opening of a history center at the Decatur House, and a look at “How to Teach the Writing of History” in this month’s issue of Historically Speaking. Then, in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, this past Monday, we have two links: an EDSITEment feature and the discovery of a long lost recording. Read on for more articles on the sub-fields of history (military history and the history of religion), history and new media, textbook revision and digitization, and history throughout the states.

News

Martin Luther King Jr.

Sub-fields of History

New Media

Textbooks

History by States

Contributors: David Darlington, Elisabeth Grant, Jessica Pritchard, and Robert B. Townsend

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January 20, 2010

National Humanities Alliance 2010 Annual Meeting & Humanities Advocacy Day

The following text is from an e-mail sent out by Jessica Jones Irons, executive director of the National Humanities Alliance, encouraging participation in this year’s NHA Annual Meeting & Humanities Advocacy Day. Register before February 7, 2010 for the March 8-9, 2010 events.

In "The Audacity of Hope", author Barack Obama recounts a conversation he had with MIT scientist Robert Langer at Northwestern University’s 2006 commencement in which they discuss a declining federal investment in research and development through the nation’s higher education institutions. The passage is important because it lays the intellectual groundwork for the soon-to-be presidential candidate’s innovation agenda, including a $42 billion proposal to spur America’s competitiveness through increased federal R&D spending. It also provides an excellent example of effective advocacy outside of Washington.  But it is to the following remark that I would like to call your attention:

"Dr. Langer’s observation isn’t unique. Each month, it seems, scientists and engineers visit my office to discuss the federal government’s diminished commitment to funding basic scientific research. Over the last three decades federal funding for the physical, mathematical, and engineering sciences has declined as a percentage of GDP- just at the time when other countries are substantially increasing their own R&D budgets…."

Since taking office, President Obama has maintained his commitment to increase research funding and on February 17, 2009 one of his first acts as president was to sign into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a $780 stimulus bill with more than $14 billion in funding for science and health R&D, including $3 billion to the National Science Foundation for grants to advance research and education in science and math.

I know this isn’t news to most of you, but my point is this:  President Obama’s R&D agenda did not develop in a vacuum.  It was informed to a great extent (and by the president’s own account) by the advocacy of scientists and engineers who came to Washington to make the case for increased federal investment, throughout Obama’s tenure as a member of the United States Senate.

We need your help in Washington, D.C. on March 8-9, 2010 to make the case for the humanities.  Your representatives and senators need to hear directly from you, as a leader in your field, on the importance of federal investment in the humanities.  Please register today to attend the National Humanities Alliance’s Annual Meeting and Humanities Advocacy Day.  The 2010 program will include:

Success of this year’s event depends upon participation from our member organizations and institutions. If you are unable to attend, as a voting Member Representative, please make sure your organization or institution is represented by designating another staff person, a board member, campus colleague, or other representative.

Help maintain our momentum.  Together we can raise the profile of the humanities research and education community in Washington, and build an infrastructure for advocacy in the humanities for the long-term.  I ask that you let us know as soon as possible how your organization will be represented.

Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Jessica Jones Irons
Executive Director

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January 19, 2010

At Open Forum AHR Staff Discuss How to Get Published in the Journal

By Pillarisetti Sudhir

Note: The 124th Annual Meeting of the AHA has concluded, but discussions of the topics and events at the meeting continue. Read on for more in this blog post, and also see our roundup of what others are saying about the Annual Meeting.

Interested in submitting an article to the AHR, but find the process mysterious? At a well-attended lunch-time open forum held on Friday, January 8, 2010, at the annual meeting, Robert A. Schneider, the editor of the American Historical Review, Associate Editor Konstantin Dierks, and a team of editorial assistants revealed the intricacies of processing articles and book reviews for eventual publication in the historical journal.

The editorial assistants help, Schneider said, with the complex process of selecting books for review out of the 3,000 or so books that are received each year, and with the even more arduous task of compiling and maintaining a database of reviewers. The database has to be comprehensive, with sufficient information on each reviewer to preclude conflicts of interest (even such seemingly far-fetched ones as an author and a reviewer having been fellow graduate students) affecting the integrity of the review.

As for articles, nearly 300 of which arrive each year at the AHR’s office in Bloomington, Indiana, all of them are read by the associate editor, who then passes them on to the editor with a brief comment as a preliminary evaluation and indicates whether the article fits the criteria of the AHR.

The journal looks, Schneider said, not only for excellent scholarship and originality, but also, most importantly, for content that speaks across the profession, transcending subdisciplinary boundaries. If an article is accepted  as appropriate for the pages of the AHR, the editor forwards the draft to members of the editorial board along with his own comments.

If the editors decide to proceed further with the article, it is sent to two experts in the field but without identifying the author. These "external" experts provide extended and elaborate comments and suggestions for revisions. By this time, the manuscript has thus accumulated six extremely useful critiques, and an author benefits from these even if an article is not ultimately accepted, declared Schneider.

He also said, in response to a question during the discussion period, that it is difficult to explain precisely how the editors determine whether an article satisfies the journal’s stipulation that it speak across the profession. But the editors can certainly decide whether an article incorporates the "outreach effect" as a foundational element or not.

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January 15, 2010

Litigating for Same-Sex Marriages Is Wrong Strategy, Says John D' Emilio

By Pillarisetti Sudhir

Note: The 124th Annual Meeting of the AHA has concluded, but discussions of the topics and events at the meeting continue. Read on for more in this blog post, and also see our roundup of what others are saying about the Annual Meeting.

Speaking on Saturday morning, January 9, 2010, to a large gathering at the breakfast meeting of the Committee on Women Historians, John D’Emilio (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago) declared that waging battles in courts to secure the right to have same-sex marriages is an entirely incorrect strategy for the gay and lesbian community.

Although he was an activist himself, he has been troubled for a long time, D’Emilio said, by the attempts to secure same-sex marriage rights in the courts. Tracing the history of seemingly successful legal cases, D’Emilio said that that the narratives of success conveyed only a part of the story, as the reaction to these court victories had, in fact, evoked widespread and deleterious consequences, in the form of amendments to state constitutions or other legislative measures that emphatically restated that marriage could only be between a man and a woman.

Pointing out that the institution of marriage was already undergoing radical transformations (single parents, simplified divorces, and so forth) despite the concerted efforts of the religious right, what was needed, perhaps, D’Emilio said, were campaigns that built alliances with groups that were advocating and advancing more liberal interpretations of marriage and thus move with the streams of history.

D’Emilio went on to say that there was a moral problem as well—that any benefits that may be secured by reaching the goal of the right for same-sex marriage would accrue disproportionately to a tiny social segment. Some people wrongly thought, D’Emilio said, that securing equal rights in marriage was a noble and ultimate aim, when there were other more important social goals to pursue and achieve (such as universal health care), and which, in fact, might actually render striving for same-sex marriage rights unnecessary altogether.

Concluding in a lighter vein, D’Emilio who was arguing against litigation for same-sex marriages, declared he was all for weddings, for weddings celebrated love, love that not only joined the couple but their worlds.

During the lively discussion that followed D’Emilio’s presentation, one member of the audience contended that the argument that D’Emilio advanced (that courts cannot legislate social change) was clearly negated by both Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education. In response, D’Emilio declared that those two Supreme Court decisions were really the culminations of a series of legal precedents set over many years and were reflections of evolving social  and cultural attitudes, whereas the lower court decisions on same-sex marriage were more ad hoc and specific to particular cases.

D’Emilio agreed, however, with another argument advanced from the floor, that all the court cases and the consequent controversies may have contributed to an increasing awareness about the issues involved, and even helped to create a more tolerant atmosphere among younger people.

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January 14, 2010

What We're Reading: 124th Annual Meeting Edition

Before, during, and now after the 124th Annual Meeting of the AHA, the web has been abuzz with articles, blog posts, and tweets on meeting sessions, events, topics, and the history profession in general. We’ve put together a roundup of this coverage below, but may have missed a few articles and posts. Please feel free to contribute more Meeting-related links in the comments section.

AHA Coverage

News Sources
Inside Higher Ed
At this year’s annual meeting Inside Higher Edtook a close look at the history job market, a topic on many minds. They also covered other topics, such as the content of some panels (for instance, “Is Google Good for History?) and other events.

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Thomas Barlett from the Chronicle of Higher Education was able to attend, and reported on sessions that explored President Obama and Google Books in relation to history.

NPR’s Marketplace
A podcast and interview from NPR’s Marketplace covered the drop in job opportunities for PhDs in the liberal arts, with sound bites from the AHA’s Job Center.

Blogs
Each annual meeting it seems like more and more historians hit the blogosphere to elaborate on topics from sessions and events at the meeting. We begin with HNN’s extensive coverage, including numerous videos, and follow up with an alphabetical listing of other blogs.

HNN

Center for History and New Media

The China Beat

Chicken Soup for My Grad Student Soul

Cliopatria

Cliotropic

Dan Cohen

Historiann

The Historical Society

History Compass Exchanges

Knitting Clio

Legal History Blog

Making History Podcast Blog

More or Less Bunk

Parezco y digo

U.S. Intellectual History

The Way of Improvement Leads Home

Wolfe’s Tone correspondent

Miniconference on Historical Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage
The miniconference on Historical Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage (assembled following a resolution from Council at last year’s meeting), and related topics were covered in a number of news articles. We present a few here:

Twitter
This year Twitter users used the #AHA2010 hashtag in their tweets from the meeting. As a number of the blog posts note, only a limited number of members took their meeting discussions onto Twitter, but check out what they had to say.

Contributors: David Darlington, Elisabeth Grant, and Robert B. Townsend

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January 13, 2010

Presidential Address and Prize Recipients at the 2010 General Meeting

By Elisabeth Grant and Pillarisetti Sudhir

The AHA’s General Meeting took place on Friday, January 8, 2010 at this year’s annual meeting. During this time the presentation of awards to recipients of AHA prizes took place, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gave her presidential address. Read on for an overview of the address and a list of all the award winners.

A Stitch in Time: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Turns a Quilt into a Rich Tapestry of History

She found it useful sometimes to address large questions by focusing on a single object, said President Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, delivering her presidential address entitled "An American Album." The object in question was a simple quilt, made in the Utah territory in 1857. But she unfolded it to lucidly tell a complex historical tale of patriarchal politics, ideologies, and religious beliefs. Originally made in the same epochal year as the Dred Scott decision and the mutiny in India, the quilt was sundered into two when it was passed on 60 odd years later as a legacy to the next generation. Only after another hundred years had passed by was it made whole again by a descendant who not only joined the two halves, but also gathered details about the women who had contributed to the making of the quilt. Work of such amateur historians and genealogists was valuable and should be acknowledged, said Ulrich, who then went on to stitch those details into her own reading of the quilt. Taking a close look at some of the quilt’s many and variegated squares, Ulrich delighted the audience with insightful and perceptive revisionings of what the quiltmakers inscribed into the fabric, situating the new, seemingly simple, but elaborate narratives into histories of interpersonal relations, of the Mormon Church, and of public reactions to polygamy and the politics of gender. The address, which will appear in the February 2010 issue of the American Historical Review, was another captivating example of Laurel Thatcher’s remarkable ability of taking a simple object and transforming it into an artifact of compelling historical interest and narrative power.

2009 Book Awards and Prizes
The following prizes were announced at the General Meeting. For this list, expanded to include citations and some biographies see the 2009 Book Awards and Prizes page on the AHA web site.

Book Prizes

Awards for Scholarly Distinction

Eugene Asher Teaching Award

Beveridge Family Teaching Prize

Extraordinary Service Award

Herbert  Feis Award for Distinguished Contributions to Public History

William Gilbert Award  for the Best Article on Teaching History

John E. O’Connor Film Award

Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award

Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History

Honorary Foreign Member

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