American Historical Association

 

Dear AHA Member,

Fortnightly News is the AHA's e-mail newsletter, sent out twice a month to keep members up to date with the AHA and the history profession.

In this issue:

1. Saving Teaching American History Grants
2. 125th Annual Meeting: Boston
3. The Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association at 107
4. National History Center: Cold War Politics and Decolonization
5. AHA Today – Recent history news
6. Call for Submissions – Regions and Regionalism
7. News from Washington – Updates from NCH, NHA, and COSSA

 

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

 

Saving Teaching American History Grants

When the 112th Congress convenes in January 2011, a high priority will be reforming the law governing K–12 education. The AHA and other history groups have already mobilized to preserve federal funding under the Teaching American History (TAH) grants program. The Obama administration has proposed eliminating the TAH program and forcing history and other academic disciplines to compete amongst themselves for scarce federal grant money. Learn more about efforts to preserve the Teaching American History grants program by going to the National Coalition for History’s site and reading “History Groups Work to Save Teaching American History Grants.”

 

125th Annual Meeting

Boston, MA
January 6–9, 2011

The 125th Annual Meeting of the AHA will be held in Boston, Massachusetts from January 6 – 9, 2011. Registration for the meeting opens September 15, 2010. The theme for this meeting is “History, Society, and the Sacred.” In the coming months, we will highlight sessions and send out more information. Until then, check out Job Center information and video coverage of past years’ meetings.

 

 

 

The Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association at 107

The Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA owes its birth in 1903 to the AHA leadership’s decision to launch an auxiliary for West Coast historians who could not easily attend annual AHA meetings.

But even after air travel made attending the AHA meetings easy, the PCB has continued to thrive as an organization. As the second oldest (after the AHA, of course!) ongoing historical association in the United States that encompasses every historical era and world region, we continue to redefine ourselves for the 21st century. 

We have significant ties to the AHA, but also an independent executive office (Executive Director Peter Blodgett) and an excellent scholarly journal, Pacific Historical Review. The PCB awards two book prizes, two article prizes (the Koontz and the Turrentine Jackson), and a dissertation prize each year. This year, we initiated a new award, the PCB-AHA Presidents’ Graduate Student Travel Award, to assist graduate students who are presenting papers at the conference.

Read the full blog post from Barbara Molony, president of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, on AHA Today.

 

Cold War Politics and Decolonization

The story of the movement that led President Obama’s father and thousands of other young Africans to study abroad in the 1950s and 1960s is much more complicated than is usually thought, according to Dan Branch, a historian of Kenya and alumnus of the National History Center’s International Seminar on Decolonization.

Focusing on students from Kenya in a talk at the Library of Congress July 28, Branch argued that Kenyans stress that the students returned home to build a new nation, while historians of civil rights point to the program as one of the first times that African Americans were able directly to influence American foreign policy. But he said this misses a crucial element: students were sent not just to the United States and Western Europe, but to Communist states in Eastern Europe and China. Their experiences, both positive and negative, injected the politics of the Cold War into the politics of Kenyan decolonization.

Branch, who participated in the seminar in 2006, is assistant professor of African history at the University of Warwick.  His first book, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009.  He is currently writing a political history of Kenya since independence.  His lecture was sponsored by the Center and the Library’s John W. Kluge Center in conjunction with this year’s seminar.

 

AHA Today

Keep up with the latest information on history and the profession on the AHA’s blog, AHA Today. Recent posts include:

• History, There’s an App for That
  Whether you need to reference an article of the Constitution, find out what happened today 100 years ago, or learn the history of the London street you’re on, we’ve found some apps that have got you covered.

• Teaching American History Grants: 124 Grants and $115.3 Million Awarded
  On August 6, 2010, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the most recent recipients of Teaching American History grants. 124 school districts—in 40 states as well as the District of Columbia and American Samoa—are recipients, being awarded $115.3 million in total, funded for a three-year period.

• Black, and White, and Read All Over: Digitized Newspaper Resources
  While traditional newspapers may not be the way of the future, they were definitely the way of the past. In this post we rounded up a number of sites that feature digitized newspapers.

• Memorable Fictional History Teachers
  On the AHA Facebook page, we asked, for fun: “Who are the most memorable fictional history teachers in film, television, and novels?”

• What Do We Know about History in the Schools?
  A colleague recently asked what, if any, information is available about history at the K–12 level. The sad answer is—not much. But there a few resources that provide helpful clues.

• Also, see the most recent What We’re Reading (August 5 and August 12) and Grant of the Week (Ida B. Wells Graduate Student Fellowship  and NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants) posts.

 

Call for Submissions – Regions and Regionalism

The AHA invites proposals by October 1, 2010, for a new pamphlet series on Regions and Regionalisms.

Regions and Regionalisms
Regions and the concomitant phenomenon of regionalisms are increasingly receiving attention as an object of historical study. For a large number of issues and questions, regions – understood as more or less integrated arenas of historical interaction that reach beyond the nation-state – appear to be the appropriate level of historical analysis. They promise to mediate between the local and national on the one hand, and global dimensions on the other.

More in this recent post on the AHA’s blog.

Article Proposals
Prospective authors may want to consider including in their essays the challenges that teachers and researchers working in the field encounter, as well as the current state and future prospects for the field of history. Manuscripts should be up to 60 typed pages (double-spaced) or about 15,000 words, with no more than 90 endnotes.

Proposals, of about 300 to 600 words, may be e-mailed by October 1, 2010, to regionalism@historians.org or mailed to Publications Department, American Historical Association, 400 A Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003-3889.

 

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.

National Coalition for History

• 2010 Teaching American History Grants Awarded by U.S. Department of Education
  U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced the award of $115.3 million to 124 school districts to improve the quality of teaching American history in our nation’s schools.

• Fiscal Year 2011 Federal Funding Comes Into Focus
  Before Congress left for its annual August recess, action on the long-stalled fiscal year 2011 budget bills began apace.

 

National Humanities Alliance

• Policymakers Convene for Language Learning Summit Members of Congress pledge support for $400 million Language Learning Act

• NEH Summer/Fall Grant Deadlines September deadlines feature undergraduate teaching grants

 

Consortium of Social Science Associations

• August 9, 2010 Washington Update

 

 

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

Contributions to this issue of Fortnightly News came from: David Darlington, Kelly Elmore, Elisabeth Grant, Vernon Horn, Pillarisetti Sudhir, Robert B. Townsend, and Lee White

 

 

Last Updated: August 16, 2010