The AHA and Mailing Lists
As members know full well, unsolicited advertisements in the mail are an unwelcome byproduct of the electronic age. The AHA is a contributor to the total volume of its members’ post, as it makes available its membership list to carefully screened advertisers.
We reject requests to purchase our lists that are not related to the concerns of history and historians. In practice this means that book publishers are the principal users of our mailing lists, since we believe that historians find book catalogs and announcements either interesting and relevant or at least a tolerable intrusion. Once in a while an unsuitable advertiser slips through our screening, but we rely on members to flag for our attention any unsuitable or distasteful material that seems to have our mailing label attached.
The one exception to book advertising is Albert H. Wohlers & Co., insurance brokers. Wohlers & Co. have for many years offered a program of group insurance to AHA members, as they do to other social science association members, to supplement their life, hospitalization, and disability income insurance. The AHA derives no income from these insurance programs, but we believe that many of our members may be interested in availing themselves of the favorable group insurance rates. This feeling is born out by recently available figures. A total of 562 AHA members insure un der the group term life insurance pro gram so made available by Wohlers. And 135 members make use of its in hospital indemnity insurance program; 276 members insure under the catastrophe major medical insurance program, and 236 members participate in the disability income insurance plan.
Donations of the AHR
Members of the American Historical Association, in accordance with priorities assigned by the United States Information Agency, donated sets of the American Historical Re view to institutions in Moscow, Belgrade, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Prague, and East Berlin. Thanks to the Agency’s generosity, twenty-six educational institutions in Eastern Europe have been presented with long runs of the AHR.
The program of donated AHRs is the second such undertaking by the Association. Several years ago a similar but smaller program of donations to universities in the People’s Republic of China produced eight sets of forty-year runs of the AHR. One of the nicest aspects of these programs is that everyone benefits but the Internal Revenue Service: scholars in foreign libraries benefit directly, the USIA and our embassy cultural at taches win friends for our country among intellectuals, and the AHA member donors receive a several-hundred-dollar tax deduction.
The following individuals are to be thanked for their contributions of AHRs:
Louis Cohn-Haft
Theodore Paullin
Stanley Winters
Richard Westfall
Walter F. Snyder
John Higham
Robert B. Holtman
Aaron M. Boom
Gerhard Weinberg
Sandi Cooper
Theodore L. Agnew
Albert H. Bowman
Ralph N. Childs
Lyle A. McGeoch
H.L. Hitchens
Edgar C. Duin
Betty Unterberger
James Z. Rabun
Irene D. Neu
Thomas T. Helde
Evans C. Johnson
James F. Vivian
John Y. Simon
Edward C. Thaden
W.L. Spalding
Samuel H. Baron
Robert V. Daniels
Richard Miller
Richard Herr
E.A. Reitan
Ernest Muller
Gusti B. Kollman
Joseph W. Martin
We are indebted to all those who made this a highly successful program.
