The members of the 1983 Program Committee and their chief historical areas of responsibility were the following: Bertram Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida (nineteenth-century United States), chair; Rondo Cameron, Emory University (modern Europe, economic), co-chair; Mildred Alpern, Spring Valley (NY) Senior High School (teaching); Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., University of Michigan (United States social, intellectual, Revolutionary); Paul Claussen, US Department of State (United States diplomacy, public); Paula Hyman, Jewish Theological Seminary (modern Europe, intellectual, social, religious); Helen Nader, Indiana University (medical, ancient, early modern Europe); Colin A. Palmer, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Latin America, Africa): Jason H. Parker, American Council of Learned Societies (East Asia, Russia); Harry N. Scheiber, University of California, Berkeley (United States legal, economic, twentieth century).
Introduction: The Committee’s General Policies
No part of the American Historical Association’s activities is quite so important to its continued vitality than the annual meeting Program. Although the American Historical Review, may be more significant in terms of scholarship, the panels at the yearly meeting are the means by which members learn from and assess each other’s ideas and determine, according to the number and quality of the offerings, whether or not the organization acknowledges in a satisfactory way their interests, methodologies, and sometimes their special claim for recognition. Attendance at meetings depends on these perceptions and has less to do, we believe, with the purely social or business aspects of the gathering than we have often assumed. If the trip is affordable, the ordinary AHA member decides to go to a convention on the basis of what the program activities personally offer.
Thus, the basic purpose for the break with some AHA traditions to be mentioned later was to accommodate the diverse needs of as many AHA members as the hotel conference space and hours in the day would permit. Also we sought to please the special groups whose affiliation with the organization has given it vigor. We were particularly sensitive, for instance, to the placing of women on panels, not just on feminist topics, but throughout the range of sessions. According to the chair’s calculations, the number of women reached 163, or a ratio of 20 percent, of the total number of participants. (We had hoped for a better showing, but a number of refusals, probably related to travel costs, reduced the total as women are most likely to be in the younger, less affluent academic ranks.) Also, we sought sessions on blacks and black participation in the program as a whole. Location affected our enlistment of black scholar participation, but with the help of August Meier, Kent State, and several others an array of black topics materialized and received fine audience response. Finally, the Committee looked favorably on submissions from junior faculty and even some graduate students in the last stages of their dissertations. By such means we encourage young men and women to enter the organization as active members. The expanded number of sessions made this policy feasible. In sum, attention was given to these and other special groups whose needs strengthen rather than weaken the overall utility of and loyalty to the organization as a whole.
I. Attendance and Participation
The number of annual meeting registrants and, most especially, the total number actually hearing and participating in sessions during the annual gatherings provide a rough estimate of morale in the organization. Therefore we are pleased to report that (1) a total of 2,241 registered for the meeting, only 10 percent less than the numbers at the 1982 Washington meeting despite the District’s geographical advantage; (2) attendance at the sessions reached the figure of 5,857 (not including nearly 400 at the affiliated-society luncheons), a marked improvement, we guess, over previous years; (3) and a total of 788 individuals—historians, guests from other professions, and foreign visitors—was listed in the program, again a record number.
After years of attrition in the membership rolls, the AHA membership losses ceased in 1982 and 1983. The Committee is confident that one reason for the gratifying shift in downward trends has been the favorable response to the programs, and in 1983, the committee’s inflation of participant ranks, coupled with the Council’s new and previously untried policy of admitting only bona fide, dues-paying AHA members to the podium. (The exceptions were our foreign scholars and nonhistorian guests.)
II. Affiliated Societies
The Committee assiduously promoted affiliated society participation. The chair wrote and called appropriate affiliated society officials who had not submitted formal sessions of their own making. Most of those reached were cooperative and agreed to sponsor the panel or panels suggested. This policy, we believed, was a means for carrying out the Council’s order for greater cooperation between the Program Committee and these organizations. The advantages to both the AHA and its affiliates are substantial: additional advertising of the respective organizations in the others’ communications with their members; a sense that the two organizations had something in common and could be mutually enriched by the contact; and, above all, the presentation of specific topics and ideas of interest to members of both organizations. The policy resulted in the identification of 32 organizations jointly sponsoring sessions. Only one affiliated society neither presented its own panel nor accepted one of those offered. Of course, the organizations which have long and friendly ties with the AHA supplied some of the most outstanding sessions (notably those by CLAH, SHAFR, and NACBS). They needed neither prompting nor assistance.
Additional devices were used to increase the numbers of participants. Under appropriate circumstances, requesting organizers gained permission to place additional participants on panels. Most important, it was determined that the only way to assure decent attendance for sessions outside the “foundation areas” of Europe and the United States was to create a critical mass of participants who could attend other colleagues’ sessions when not on the platform themselves. Thus, for instance, there were lively series in ancient history, public history, teaching. microcomputing and demographic topics and so on.
III. Program Themes and Series
Under the guidance of President Philip D. Curtin, the Committee directed its attention to a number of special concerns with potentially broad appeal. Chief concentrations were in the areas of economic, diplomatic, and comparative history. In addition, plans were made for panels to address the role of history in various divisions of the national media. Also, the Committee resolved to secure sessions on the Third World, notably Africa and the Middle East, with a special regard for the economic and social ramifications of slavery in other lands as well as the North American continent. Despite concerted efforts to recruit scholars in Asian and Southeast Asian studies, the Committee was disappointed at the scarcity of submissions, particularly in light of our West Coast locale. Only three Asian panels were staged.
In keeping with these policies regarding topics with which former President Gordon A. Craig, President Philip D. Curtin, and President-elect Arthur S. Link have been long associated, a lengthy series of sessions were presented in these specialties: 18 in economic and labor; 15 in comparative history; 13 in diplomatic; and 5 in slavery. Other areas were not ignored, however, as the following national and topical listings show: Germany (5); France (5); British Isles and Ireland (8); Italy (4); Soviet Union (4); medieval (12): education (12); professional (9); religion (9); social (24); women (11). Although the range was wide, the plenary session on “The Rise of Capitalism,” which drew an audience of 250, underlined the economic and comparative orientation of the program. Carlo Cipolla of Berkeley, Alfred Chandler of Harvard, the main speakers, and Peter Mathias of Oxford University, their distinguished commentator, provided a most erudite and well-received introduction to the convention as a whole.
As former program chairs know. the media sessions are the most difficult to handle because they involve individuals operating in a fast-breaking field alien to our calendar regularity. Owing to financial constraints, a panel on history and television newscasting and another on the syndicated editorial column had to be dropped. Much more successful was the exhibition and later panel discussion of two major films cinematically innovative in their historical accuracy and realism: The Return of Martin Guerre and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, with actor Edward Olmos and producer-director Moctezuma Esparza to represent their production. The Committee lakes special pride in this presentation because, through the imaginative cooperation of Robert Rosenstone (CalTech), Natalie Davis (Princeton), Eileen Gaylard, Sam Gammon, and Local Arrangements Chair Tom Wendel (San Jose State), we overcame obstacles that far exceeded even the many usually encountered in presenting media sessions. In addition, a well-attended and informative session on national press book-reviewing of scholarly works, with Sheldon Meyer of Oxford University Press and Art Seidenbaum of the Los Angeles Times, completed this somewhat truncated but most stimulating media series.
IV. Proposals
The Committee received approximately 327 proposals in various states of readiness. Rondo Cameron chaired the caucus on non-American topics, while the smaller American group acted separately. All submissions, however, were reviewed by the whole Committee. Almost no unsolicited submissions were devoted to ancient, Asian, African, or Russian topics, and in the American field, only one full panel existed for the period before 1860, until very late in the process. As a result, at least half if not more of the presentations were the result of heavy recruiting, advising, and shaping by the Program Committee membcrs themselves. It should be mentioned that Helen Nader performed near miracles in creating three sessions on ancient topics, all of which drew at least 20 to 25 listeners, for the reasons mentioned above. Likewise, Colin Palmer and the Conference on Latin American History produced 13 panels for that field, the largest number in the history of the two organizations’ joint ventures and numerous enough to cause conflict problems in nearly all time slots. In addition Palmer obtained four sessions on African themes, one of which included Claude Meillassoux, the distinguished French Africanist. These also attracted audiences of at least 25. The chair, Mildred Alpern, and Robert Berkhofer also accounted for a large number of solicited panels in American history and teaching. Paula Hyman increased the number and quality of European intellectual and religious themes, and Paul Claussen’s prodigious labors led to the largest number of United States foreign relations sessions ever presented to the organization.
V, Additional Time Slots and Hotel Space Allocation
Having committed itself to one of the greatest number of Program activities in AHA history, the Committee turned the responsibility for locating rooms and times for their presentation to Eileen Gaylard of the AHA Washington staff and Tom Wendel, Chair, Local Arrangements Committee. The only solution was the acquisition of space at the Sheraton, with the considerable disadvantage of its distance. Staging two almost separate conventions was an unfortunate consequence but had the two AHA organizers been spared their efficient labors, forty sessions would have had to be dropped with depressing effect on convention registration, broken panel sequences, omission of topics and fields worthy of presentation, and the failure of the Committee’s larger purposes. A ten-minute walk between the Sheraton and the Hyatt seemed a small price to pay.
More controversial, no doubt, was the necessity of adding two extra time slots and the expansion of the usually undernourished schedule on the convention’s last day. Regarding the latter, as always, the audiences were thin for the last-day meetings, but the alternative would have been to drop about 22 panels. Moreover, some sessions had to appear then or not at all because of the exigencies of key participants.
Certainly those who participated in panels on Wednesday, 5-7 p.m., and Thursday evening, 8-10 p.m., felt disadvantaged, a circumstance with which the Committee sympathized. Yet, we felt the deprivation of some served the interests of many who benefited from the expanded program. Besides, the two periods flourished much better than one might have guessed. In fact, “California: The Great Exception Revisited” drew about 50 listeners on Thursday evening, “many of them nonacademics,” and all but five stayed to the end, according to Leonard Pitt, the session’s chair. He added, “There can be no doubt that it was one of the best sessions attended in recent memory and that the experimental AHA evening sessions are a success.”
The California session was not the only odd-hour session to draw a good audience. Several matched the high attendance figures at popular sessions during regular time periods and the experiment enabled almost a thousand individuals to hear panels of their choice. In the Committee’s opinion that represents sufficient numbers to continue the practice. There was, however, one unanticipated but important defect. Several Thursday-evening panels, to their detriment, conflicted with smokers and lost numbers of scholarly souls to sins of the flesh.
Although special care was taken to avoid conflicts in regular periods, they did, alas, arise. “European Socialism” competed with “French 20th-Century Thought.” “The Japanese Peacc Settlement of 1951” with distinguished foreign guests, also drew only 20 because it was set against a well-advertised and well-populated SHAFR-AHA session on the wartime Teheran Conference. Ofttimes, though, conflicts appear because at the last minute a panel must be rescheduled owing to a key participant’s change of plans, with consequences that cannot be helped. We hope, though, that most everyone had to make difficult choices among the sessions at every time period, a sure sign of a program’s vitality.
VI. Session Problems and Successes
No meeting has ever lacked last-minute problems, but owing to Tom Wendel’s local arrangements and press staffs, there were few mix-ups and the press releases about particular sessions were notably accurate and full. The chief failing was the nonappearance of some key figures on panels, an issue that the Council will have to address. Particularly distressing was the casualness with which some foreign guests announced their change of plans. The entire People’s Republic of China delegation withdrew to kill a full session after the program went to press. An earlier refusal would have at least opened a room to a worthy replacement. A handful of East and West European and English historians were scarcely less arrogant. In fact, Richard Leopold, chair for “American Foreign Policy, 1900-1940s: The European Perspective,” urges future Committees to consider most closely the acceptance of proposals for sessions from abroad. Two of the foreign panelists failed to appear, and the guest from the Continent who did turn up might just as well have stayed home. A few American historians similarly dishonored themselves, one compounding his truancy by requesting that his paper, 71 pages long, be condensed by the session’s chair who received it just before Christmas.
Some sessions were so outstanding that they deserve special mention. The topic of “E. P. Thompson Twenty Years After,” jointly sponsored with the North American Conference on British Studies, drew the largest audience at the meeting (350), and the papers and comments, aside from some excessive loquacity, were judged unusually stimulating. “World History, 924-1500” proved the popularity of the broad approach to history (95 people crowded into much too small a room to hear William H. McNeill and others deliver excellent papers). According to reports, the film Ballad of Gregorio Cortez was most engrossing, though the audiences at the two showings were regrettably small. The film and history panel drew eighty enthusiastic listeners at the unpopular time period of Friday morning. Many expressed the hope that future sessions will imitate the format—actors, directors, film experts, and academic consultants discussing their historical and cinematic perspectives. Also worthy of mention were the following exemplary and lively sessions, some with large audiences, some with small: New England Witchcraft (70); Multiple Biographies (70); Winston Churchill (70); “Teaching Latin American History” (70); Teheran Conference (100); Late Medieval Church Historiography (50); “Women’s Dreams c. 1600” (70); “Fascism and Visual Arts” (40); “Law and Race, US” (30, Thursday, 8-10 p.m.); microcomputer sessions (60-100); “Cold War Films” (50, Thursday, 8-10 p.m.); “New Topics in History Instruction” (20); “Written Craft” (150); “Good Decision Making” (25); “Ethical Foundations of Slavery” (90); “Psychopathology” (70+, at the experimental Wednesday 5-7 period); and “History Instruction Techniques” (20, Wednesday at the same hours}, cheerfully rescued by Professor J. A. Scott with guitar in the absence of’ key participants. “Canadian External Policy” had to be cancelled for lack of an audience on Thursday evening, a casualty of the rival smokers.
There were many others of excellent quality, too. Although there is no room to remark upon them all, we must mention a special activity: the walking tour of North Beach was overcrowded with 70 San Francisco enthusiasts assembled. The chair was particularly chagrined about inadvertently overlooking San Francisco State Professor Robert Cherny’s offer of another equally interesting tour plan volunteered early in the Committee’s organizing period.
VII. Conclusion
Judging from the reactions at the convention and the relatively few complaints apart from the trade-offs mentioned already, the Committee feels justified in claiming that the convention was an unusually satisfying experience. The beauty of San Francisco, the appointments of the hotels, the Vatican Museum Collection, and the reasonable hotel rates which the AHA headquarters obtained made it a most memorable convention. We hope that the favorable impression was generally shared.
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida, is chair of the 1983 Program Committee.
