American Historical Association

 

Dear AHA Member,

Fortnightly News is the AHA's e-mail newsletter, sent out around the first and fifteenth of every month to keep members up to date with the AHA and the history profession.

In this issue:

1. AHA Today – Recent history news
2. News from Washington – Updates from NCH, COSSA, and NHA
3. Social Studies-History Standards – Contribute Your Comments
4. New and updated entries at the ArchivesWiki
5. Calendar – History Events
6. 125th Anniversary Fund

 

Please feel free to forward this e-mail to your friends and colleagues.

 

AHA Today

Perspectives on History is on hiatus for the summer, but you can keep up with the latest information on history and the profession on the AHA’s blog, AHA Today. Recent posts include:

• American Historical Review Remains Tops in History
  The American Historical Review had the highest “impact factor” in its history in 2008, according to the latest Journal Citation Reports from Thomson Reuters.

• Myron Gutmann Appointed Head of NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
  Historian and longtime AHA member Myron Gutmann has been appointed to head the National Science Foundation’s directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.

• Distorting History in the New Classification of Instructional Programs
  The Department of Education has just published a new Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) that tries to reduce our discipline to a few categories ranging from American history to military history, but the categories selected for note offer a rather distorted picture of what students are being taught in our field.

• Hoping for the Best, Preparing for the Worst
  Fire, flooding, earthquakes; disasters come unexpectedly in many shapes and forms. And the ways to prepare for such events are just as varied. We’ve put together a list of a number of classes and online resources that specifically target libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions that maintain collections.

• In Memoriam: Kenneth M. Stampp
  One of the 20th century’s most formidable scholars of slavery, the American Civil War, and the Reconstruction, Kenneth Milton Stampp, passed away on Friday, July 10, 2009. Stampp died of a heart ailment in Oakland, California. He was 96.

• iTunes U: Fun for Academics and Eternal Scholars Alike
  iTunes U offers over 175,000 free downloadable educational audio and video files.

• Also, see the most recent What We’re Reading (July 16, July 23, and July 30) and Grant of the Week posts (Innovative Strategies in Community Colleges, Teaching Development Grants, and the Heineken Prize for History)

 

News from Washington

In addition to AHA Today, the Association also draws on the efforts of a number of coalitions that support the Association's agenda to keep track of issues in the nation’s capital that will be of concern to historians. Here are news updates from some of them.

• The National Coalition for History



• President Obama Nominates David S. Ferriero To Be Archivist of the U.S. (updated)
  On July 28, President Obama announced his intent to nominate David S. Ferriero to the position of Archivist of the United States.

• President Names Jarvis Director of National Park Service
  President Obama recently announced his intention to nominate Jonathan Jarvis to be director of the National Park Service. Jarvis, a 30-year veteran of the Park Service, currently is the regional director of the agency’s Pacific West Region.

 

• COSSA

• The July 27,2009 (PDF) COSSA Washington Update covered the following, and more:

  • Hill Briefing Highlights NSTC Report
  • House Passes Labor, HHS, Education Spending Bill
  • A Big Week for Census
  • NCES Releases Report on Student Achievement Gap at State Level

 

• National Humanities Alliance

• President Obama Nominates Archivist of the United States NYPL Director, David S. Ferriero, tapped to lead the National Archives

• White House Launches Service Initiative, Humanities community encouraged to participate

 

Social Studies-History Standards

Your comments needed!

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) announces its public review period for the Social Studies-History Standards. The standards can be accessed through this survey from July 27 to August 9, 2009.

Please visit the NBPTS web site for information on standards development. For assistance or additional information about the public review process, please contact NBPTS at nominations@nbpts.org

 

New and Updated Entries at the ArchivesWiki

Here are some of the archival institutions that have been recently added or updated on the AHA's ArchivesWiki. We hope you will find them useful, and will add any information about them you may have about them, or other institutions.

• Alabama Department of Archives and History

• Archives departementales du Cantal

• Archives départementales de la Haute-Garonne

• Archives départementales de Lot-et-Garonne

• Archives départementales de la Haute-Savoie

• Archives départementales de la Moselle

• Archive of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

• Archives municipales de Rennes

• The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People

• Churchill Archives Centre

• City of Westminster Archives Centre

• Edinburgh University Archives

• Fingal County Archives

• Historical Archives of the Technical University of Munich

• Irish Architectural Archive

• Oxford University Archives

• Parliamentary Archives

• Prato State Archives

• Rockefeller Archive Center

• Service historique de la défense, Centre historique des archives

• Südwestdeutsches Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau

• The Warburg Institute Archive

• Western Historical Manuscript Collection - Columbia

 

Calendar

The AHA’s online calendar lists upcoming meetings and seminars, research opportunities, awards and fellowships, internet resources, and exhibitions. Contribute your own announcement through this online form. Below we offer snippets of some of the current listings.

• Call for Papers: New Perspectives in American Freemasonry and Fraternalism— Symposium on "New Perspectives on American Freemasonry and Fraternalism," to be held Friday, April 9, 2010, National Heritage Museum, Lexington, Massachusetts. Proposal deadline August 15, 2009.

• Ladies Workbasket Workshop Series—Take a step back into the 1800's and join us at the beautiful historic Belle Meade Plantation in Nashville, TN.

• Call for Proposals: Truth and Method Fifty Years After: Gadamer's Influence on the Humanities—Almost 50 years ago, Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960) appeared. Proposals solicited on the influence of Gadamer's book on the theory and practice of interpretation in the humanities. The conference is scheduled to take place from August 26-28, 2010. Deadline September 1, 2009.

• The Failure to Bomb Auschwitz: History, Politics, Controversy—The seventh national conference of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, to be held at Fordham University Law School, September 13, 2009.

• Call for Abstracts: American Association for the History of Medicine—The American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) invites submissions in any area of medical history for its 83rd annual meeting, to be held in Rochester, Minnesota, April 29 through May 2, 2010.

Read more about all of these events and more at the AHA’s online calendar.

125th Anniversary Fund

We have already received generous support from many members of the Association. If you have not yet contributed, and would like to aid in the expansion of the Association’s public programs and outreach efforts, we hope you will give your support to the AHA 125th Anniversary Fund.

You can contribute to the fund online at www.historians.org/give or by check to AHA Anniversary Fund, 400 A St. S.E., Washington, DC 20003.

 

Please feel free to forward this email on to a colleague or friend.

Contributions to this issue of Fortnightly News came from: David Darlington, Elisabeth Grant, Vernon Horn, and Robert Townsend

 

 

 

Last Updated: August 3, 2009