Dear AHA Member,
AHA news and updates for the history profession.
In this issue:
- American Historical Review – December 2010
- Perspectives on History – December 2010
- AHA Today – Recent history news
- News from Washington – Updates from NCH, NHA, and COSSA
Please feel free to forward this e-mail to your friends and colleagues.
2011 Annual Meeting
Housing cut-off date extended
Annual Meeting attendees can continue to hotel reservations for the annual meeting at the AHA's discounted rates through the AHA's housing service. The new housing cut-off dates are December 16, 2010 for the Westin Copley Place, and December 20, 2010 for the Boston Marriott Copley Place, Sheraton Boston, and Boston Park Plaza.
To make a housing reservation, first preregister for the meeting (by logging in to member services). Once you’ve registered follow the provided link or phone number to make your hotel reservation. Or, if you prefer to make the hotel reservation later, the preregistration e-mail confirmation will contain all contact information to make a guest room or suite reservation. A third option is to log in to the registration resource center, go to My Account, and then click the housing link on the left.
Preregistration
Preregister now for the 125th Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, January 6–9, 2011. Members can preregister by logging in to member services and clicking the link to “Meeting Registration” on the main page Members Services page. The deadline to receive the preregistration rates for the annual meeting is December 22, 2010. After that onsite registration rates apply.
Registration Resource Center
The messaging function is now available in the Registration Resource Center. Log in today to contact others who have registered for the meeting or sign up to receive e-mail or text message alerts when you have a message waiting for you. The Registration Resource Center also provides receipts and links to housing.
Job Center
The deadline for search committees to reserve space at official Job Center interview facilities has passed, but there are a very limited number of tables still available. Please log on to the Job Center page to find the latest availability information and the reservation forms you’ll need for a successful meeting. Questions? Contact Liz Townsend.
More Information
See the AHA’s Annual Meeting web page for more information on hotels, venue locations, registration, exhibit hall details, transportation, and the Job Center. Also, view the Program of the 125th Annual Meeting online.
Job Center FAQs
So the time has come to look for a new job. The Job Center is one of the places you’ll need to be. A big part of each and every AHA annual meeting, at the Job Center we hope to connect you as a candidate with the search committee that has the right position for you. As there are a lot of new people in the job market every year, here we thought we’d answer the most frequent questions candidates have about the Job Center.
Do I need to register for the annual meeting to use the Job Center?
Yes, job candidates need to be registered for the meeting to use official Job Center facilities. There will be no exceptions.
Is there a separate registration or sign-up to needed to use the Job Center?
For candidates, there is no additional charge or registration beyond conference registration needed to use the Job Center.
Where is the Job Center?
The Job Center interviewing tables, the information booth, the c.v. collection booth, and the Electronic Search Committee Locator System will be in the Hynes Convention Center, Ballroom A. Job Center interview rooms will be located in the Sheraton Boston and Boston Marriott Copley Place.
Read these and many more answers to frequently asked questions on the Job Center, like “Is there free wifi at the Job Center?,” “What should I bring,” and “What else do I need to know before going through this?,” in this recent AHA Today blog post.
Register to see "The Conspirator" at the Annual Meeting
Register to attend an exclusive free screening of The Conspirator, the debut film from the American Film Company, on Saturday, January 8th at 7 p.m. at the 125th Annual Meeting before the film is released in theaters in spring 2011. To attend the screening you must register here.
The film, which tells the story of Mary Surratt’s trial following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, is directed by Robert Redford, written by James Solomon, and stars Robin Wright, James McAvoy, Kevin Kline, and Tom Wilkinson.
Following the screening of the film will be a panel discussion with the film’s consulting historians, Frederic L. Borch III, Kate Clifford Larson, and Thomas R. Turner, and a reception.
Founded on the belief that real life is often more compelling than fiction, The American Film Company produces feature films about incredible, true stories from America’s past. To find out more about The American Film Company and their work with prominent historians click here.
Again, make sure to register online in order to attend this exclusive screening.
Twitter at the Annual Meeting
Attending the 125th Annual Meeting in Boston? Have a Twitter account? Use the hashtag #AHA2011 for tweets about sessions, events, and other AHA annual meeting related topics.
Also, be sure to follow the AHA on Twitter (@AHAhistorians) to stay up-to-date with AHA news!
Session of the Week
We’ve launched a new series on the AHA blog that will run each Monday through the first week in January 2011, highlighting a “session of the week” pulled from the Program of the 125th Annual Meeting. So we’ve featured the following sessions:
History and Fiction: Creative Intersections
Historians and authors of historical fiction come together in session 156, History and Fiction: Creative Intersections, to discuss researching and writing historical fiction, as well as using fiction and film in the classroom. This roundtable includes historian Jane Kamensky, who co-authored the novel Blindspot with Jill Lepore, author Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her book March (which tells the story of “the character of the absent father…who has gone off to war,” in Little Women), Donald Ostrowski, a historian of medieval Russia and a teacher who uses fiction and film in class, Joan Neuberger, a historian of Soviet film, and Peter Ho Davies, whose most recent book The Welsh Girl, creates a story about a “WWII POW camp built by the British in the remote mountains of northern Wales and Esther.”Getting the Most Out of the Annual Meeting
First time at the annual meeting? Not sure what to expect? Stop by the Getting the Most Out of the Annual Meeting orientation session to hear advice on using the meeting to advance your professional goals, build your network, and enhance your teaching. Learn how to navigate the Job Center, and hear about sessions of interest to graduate students and early career historians.Teachinghistory.org Workshop - National History Education Clearinghouse
This session will explore the National History Education Clearinghouse web site, while also delving into teaching history with objects, using digital tools and public media, engaging students in historical analysis, and finding resources to teach about immigration.No Sacred Story: Reframing Abraham Lincoln in Historical Memory, AHA session 265. Leslie J. Lindenauerand Martha E. May look to recent use of Lincoln in “video games, the web, and in film” and how he’s often represented as “one bad ass dude.” Christopher Castiglia’s presentation will delve into Lincoln’s sexuality and what its “significance might be for our understanding of nineteenth-century culture and politics.” David A. Silkenat explores Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives to investigate “divisions among African Americans about the long legacy of the Civil War and emancipation.” W. Fitzhugh Brundage will chair the session and David W. Blight will conclude the session with his comments.
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Wise Use of the Methods Course, AHA Session 4. Papers from Linda Sargent Wood, Laura M. Westhoff, Robert B. Bain, and Tim Keirn, cover topics of problem-based learning, teaching U.S. history in secondary classrooms, disciplinary literacy, and teacher preparation.
John Hope Franklin: Life and Legacy
Attend a special session, John Hope Franklin: Life and Legacy, sponsored by the AHA Committee on Minority Historians on Sunday, January 9, from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. in the Hynes Convention Center Room 202.
Chair: Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Vanderbilt University
Panel:
John W. Franklin, National Museum of African American History and Culture
David Barry Gaspar, Duke University
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Harvard University
Leon F. Litwack, University of California at Berkeley
Genna Rae McNeil, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2010 AHA Election Results
These individuals will begin their terms of office following the 125th Annual Meeting in Boston.
President
Anthony Grafton (Princeton Univ.)President-elect
William Cronon (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison)Vice-President, Professional Division
Jacqueline Jones (Univ. of Texas at Austin)Councilor Profession
Sara Abosch (Univ. of Memphis)Councilor Research
Martha Howell (Columbia Univ.)Councilor Teaching
Anne F. Hyde (Colorado Coll.)Committee on Committees
John Connelly (Univ. of California, Berkeley)Nominating Committee
Position 1: Raul A. Ramos (Univ. of Houston)
Position 2: Pekka J. Hämäläinen (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara)
Position 3: Sandra E. Greene (Cornell Univ.)
Why Midterms Matter
Julian E. Zelizer explains the historical significance of the November 2, 2010, U.S. election
The 2010 midterm elections did not go well for President Obama or Democrats. With Republicans taking control of the House and the Democratic majority having been significantly narrowed in the Senate, the administration will not have much luck working with Capitol Hill.
Although some commentators see an opportunity for bipartisan compromise, after the experience of the past two years, when Washington looked more like a steel-cage wrestling match than a forum for rational deliberation, there is little reason to believe that the parties will find any areas of agreement. Before the election, Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell already declared, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Experts will spend a long time trying to sort through the various causes behind the outcome. It will be difficult to determine exactly which factors, some local, some national, and some having to do with the particularities of candidates, were the most important.
But what we do know already is that the elections have reshaped the legislative playing field for President Obama. That’s what midterms can do. His administration will now have to survive a divided Congress where conservatives will be able to shape deliberations since they control the House and since the size of their minority in the Senate will make it virtually impossible for Democrats to push through any bill that does not command some Republican support. It could very well be that the 2010 midterms have reversed the results of 2006 when Democrats had finally regained control over the legislative process. The question is how lasting the impact will be.
Read the rest of this article by Julian E. Zelizer online here.
Call for Proposals: Regions and Regionalisms in the Modern World
The AHA invites proposals by December 31, 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.
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 byDecember 31, 2010, to regionalism@historians.org or mailed to Publications Department, American Historical Association, 400 A Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003-3889.
Find more information in this recent post on the AHA’s blog.
American Historical Review – December 2010
By Konstantin Dierks and Sarah Knott (Indiana Univ.), acting editors of the American Historical Review
The December issue of the American Historical Review should be received by members shortly. This issue includes stand-alone articles 20th-century decolonization in Central Eurasia and on humanitarianism in the Eastern Mediterranean. An AHR Forum examines new perspectives on the Enlightenment via three original essays and a lengthy comment. There are also three featured reviews and our usual extensive book review section.
Articles
In "The Many Deaths of a Kazak Unaligned: Osman Batur, Chinese Decolonization, and the Nationalization of a Nomad," Justin Jacobs explores the transition from empire to nationalized state in 20th-century Central Eurasia. The life of the nomadic Kazak chieftain Osman Batur reveals a self-made "hero" of non-noble birth who was able to exploit the crisis of Han legitimacy on the Chinese frontier. Modern China, the case of Osman reminds us, was a colonial not a colonized state. After Osman's death in 1949, Chinese myths painted him as an unrepentant feudal bandit, a historical memory that served as a useful smokescreen for a nationalizing ethnic Han constituency. The simultaneous exodus of a small band of his followers, meanwhile, ensured that in Turkish and Kazak guise, Osman became a larger-than-life Kazak nationalist who fought both Russian and Chinese "imperialists." Thus a historically unaligned nomad was subject to twofold and militant transnationalization. The life and the historical memory of Osman prove to reveal the very divergent legacies of Soviet and Chinese decolonization in Central Eurasia.
Keith David Watenpaugh explores "The League of Nations' Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927." The essay centers on the efforts by the League of Nations to rescue women and children survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. This rescue—a seemingly unambiguous good—was at once a constitutive act in drawing the boundaries of the international community, a key moment in the definition of humanitarianism, and a site of resistance to the colonial presence in the post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. Drawing from a wide range of source materials in a number of languages, including Turkish, Armenian, and Arabic, the essay brings the intellectual and social context of humanitarianism in initiating societies together with the lived experience of humanitarianism in the places where the act took form. In so doing, it draws our attention to the proper place of the Eastern Mediterranean, and its women and children, in the global history of humanitarianism. The prevailing narrative of the history of human rights places much of its emphasis on the post–World War II era, the international reaction to the Holocaust, and the founding of the United Nations.
AHR Forum
This forum on "New Perspectives on the Enlightenment" suggests that the Enlightenment offers a rich genealogy for contemporary debates and that Enlightenment scholars are once again asking big questions. In "Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the Natural Historians," Fredrik Albritton Jonsson explores how the defense of global commerce pioneered in the Enlightenment was tied to the improvement of the natural order. Two rival ecologies, one made by natural historians and the other developed by Adam Smith and his liberal successors, vied for intellectual precedence as well as for practical application in the metropole and the colonies. Together they constitute the beginnings of an ongoing quarrel over the environmental foundation of capitalism. William Max Nelson's "Making Men: Enlightenment Ideas of Racial Engineering," meanwhile, suggests a colonial and Enlightenment genealogy for racial ideas more commonly associated with the 19th and 20th centuries. He exposes unfulfilled pseudo-eugenic plans, focused on the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, in which racial engineering through controlled "breeding" was seen as a solution to challenges to stability after the Seven Years' War. Turning to Italy, Sophus A. Reinert takes on the conventional claim that the Enlightenment mainstream put its faith in peaceful laissez-faire economics. "Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and Decline in Enlightenment Italy" reveals a dynamic debate about the relationship between war and wealth, the nature of economic competition, and the causes of the decline of states. The concluding comment to the forum by Karen O'Brien observes the robust health of Enlightenment studies and of the Enlightenment as a complex resource for contemporary debate.
We look forward to publishing AHA President Barbara Metcalf's address in the February 2011 issue, alongside articles spanning from barbarians ancient and modern to the first historian of human rights, the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora, and the scavenging imperial Soviet state.
Perspectives on History – December 2010
The online version of the December issue of Perspectives on History is now available to AHA members (sign in to member services to gain full access).
Introduction
This issue begins with Barbara D. Metcalf saying “Hasta la vista and Farewell,” as her term as AHA President comes to a close. In her article she notes the recent Virginia textbook controversy, which Jim Grossman addresses in “Historical Malpractice and the Writing of Textbooks,” and the History News Network, discussed in Joyce Appleby and James M. Banner, Jr.’s article “The History News Service: Fourteen Years On.”
News
In recent news, the National Humanities Alliance is gearing up for Humanities Day and looking for historians to participate, Robert B. Townsend reports on recent History Doctoral Program data from an NRC report, and we recognize donors to the association. Also, be sure to submit proposals for the 2012 Annual Meeting and note that the AHA 2012 Program Committee is encouraging panel, roundtable, and demos of technology pertaining to research, communication, archiving, and other activities related to scholarship.
Election
This issue covers both the election results for the AHA’s new officers and committee members, as well as the last month’s U.S. election.
Julian E. Zelizer looks at the November 2, 2010, U.S. election and explains “Why Midterms Matter,” while Lee White delves into “The Impact of the 2010 Congressional Election” and explains how history programs (like Teaching American History grants) will be affected. White also takes a snapshot of current happenings in Washington for his December News Briefs.
Profession
Read articles by Robert B. Townsend on using new media to teach history, and by Katharine Hijar on the right etiquette for the job market.
“Lessons of History” by Christopher Tomlins adds a new, nuanced layer to the Art of History series, while Charles F. Howlett takes a look at “American Peace History since the Vietnam War” for the State of the Field column.
Letters to the Editor & In Memoriam
The December issue contains a number of Letters to the Editor, covering topics of research threads, public history, The Battle of Algiers, scholars and teachers, and the annual meeting as a rite. We also remember the late Werner Thomas Angress and John Anthony Scott.
AHA Today
Keep up with the latest information on history and the profession on the AHA’s blog, AHA Today. Recent posts include:
Technology Demos and other Proposals for the 2012 Annual Meeting
The AHA 2012 Program Committee would like to encourage panel, roundtable, and demos of technology pertaining to research, communication, archiving, and other activities related to scholarship.Books by Members – November 2010
As a service to AHA members, we are listing books by members received in the headquarters office in recent months.On Sessions, Methods, and the Counting of Beans
There are seven sessions at the meeting as a whole (including two numbered sessions) that are related to digital history.POV Documentaries and Resources for Educators
POV, which stands for point-of-view, is “TV’s longest-running showcase for independent non-fiction films.” The POV web site has an entire section, named “For Educators,” that is devoted to how teachers can use these films and related lesson plans in the classroom.Linda Kerber: Sexing Citizenship
Past AHA President Linda Kerber recently co-authored the Slate article “Sexing Citizenship” with Kristin Collins.Also, see the most recent What We’re Reading (November 18, Thanksgiving, and December 2) and Grant of the Week (Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellowships, Residential Fellowships , SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship).
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
Implications of 2010 Elections for Federal History and Archives Programs
Administration Issues New Rules For Handling “Controlled Unclassified Information”
National Humanities Alliance
Continuing Resolution Set to Expire, Senate Rejects Earmark Ban Congress returns from Thanksgiving break
Registration Now Open for Humanities Advocacy Day 2011 & NHA Annual Meeting National Humanities Alliance will meet in Washington, DC March 7-8
Consortium of Social Science Associations
- November 22, 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, Debbie Ann Doyle, Kelly Elmore, Elisabeth Grant, James Grossman, Vernon Horn, Pillarisetti Sudhir, Sharon K. Tune, Liz Townsend, and Robert B. Townsend
Last Updated: December 6, 2010
