Correction
Dear Editor:
I was pleased to see my piece on curricular reform in the January 1986 issue of Perspectives, p. 21. Unfortunately, a crucial passage was omitted. Its absence makes it look as if the Yale Report supported the elective system—the opposite of the truth.
The omitted phrase is, “The antebellum colleges had held to the prescribed curriculum,” following, “Most academics know about this central development in education history.”
Sincerely,
Hugh Hawkins
Amherst College
India and China Move Up
Dear Editor:
Donald Johnson’s principal criticism of our text, Living World History (“Integrating Asia into the World History Curriculum,” January 1986 Perspectives, page 11), is that India is not introduced until page 204 and China not until page 222. Had he consulted our more recent text, History and Life: The World and Its People, which has been on the market since 1977, he would have found Indus civilization introduced on page 37 and Chinese civilization introduced on page 41.
Had he also checked the title pages of both texts more carefully, he would not have misspelled my name.
Sincerely,
Arnold Schrier
University of Cincinnati
Correction to Former AHR Editor’s Annual Report
Dear Editor:
The editor of the American Historical Review in his annual report for 1985 (Program of the One Hundredth Annual Meeting [1985], pp. 112-16) commented on the session entitled “The American Historical Review: The Next Fifty Years,” which was included in the program of the annual meeting of 1984. He attributed to me a proposal that I did not make and ignored the proposal that I did make. He summarized my proposal in these words.
The ex-president advocated that the article section be abandoned—except for the annual presidential address; that it be replaced by reincorporating the publication Recently Published Articles into the Review; and that the members of the Association be given a choice between the Review and the proposed new popular magazine of his tory.
This was not what I proposed. I quote my proposal from the text of my paper presented at the session.
I propose that the Review be recreated as a journal of record of historical scholarship, that it publish review articles, book reviews, the present “Collected Essays” and “Documents and Bibliographies,” and “Recently Published Articles” (returned to its former place in the Review). I would make one concession to tradition; each year’s Presidential Address would continue to be published as the lead article in the February number.
The entire remainder of my paper, about half of it, was devoted almost entirely to argument in support of giving first place in the Review to review articles. This was the novel and central element of my proposal. Professor Pflanze did not mention it. I, on the other hand, did not mention the projected popular magazine of history.
I write only to set the record straight. My annoyance at being misrepresented in print does not diminish my admiration of Professor Pflanze’s skilled editing of the Review and his consistent production, quarter after quarter, of a first-rate journal that honors the Association.
Sincerely yours,
David H. Pinkney
University of Washington
Response to Correction
Dear Editor:
The session to which Pinkney refers was sponsored by the AHA’s Research Division. During the preparatory discussions of the Division, it was repeatedly stated that the editor and former editors of the Review would be invited to comment on the papers. But the intended commentators were never asked whether they would participate. Their names did not appear on the printed program, and advance copies of the papers were not sent to them. Shortly before the convention, I called two former editors and found that they knew nothing about the session and would not be present. Under these circumstances I decided not to attend.
Since Pinkney has never provided me with a copy of his paper, my only exact knowledge of it is limited to the above letter. In writing my annual report, I had the benefit of a memorandum addressed by Pinkney to the AHA Council on March 31, 1981. I received this document from Gerhard Weinberg, chairman of the Research Division, who presented it for discussion at the Division meeting in October 1982. The memorandum became the starting point for the December 1984 session. It contains the essence of Pinkney’s convention paper, judging from the description in his letter.
Under Pinkney’s proposal Recently Published Articles, presently an independent publication with its own subscriber list, would be incorporated into the Review, whose article section it would indeed replace. The AHR is limited for financial reasons to 1,800 pages yearly, cover to cover. The RPA is a growing publication, which would, even in its present size (450 pages), consume all of the space allotted to articles. No room would be left for additional reviews and review articles. Worse still, the Review would cease to publish works of original scholarship. Each year the AHR publishes twenty to twenty-two articles, whose authors have, in the judgment of qualified referees, contributed significantly to our knowledge of the past. The effect of Pinkney’s proposal would be to exclude all of them but not the AHA presidents, whose annual addresses are the only unreferred articles published by the journal.
The RPA was separated from the Review in 1975 largely for financial reasons. As part of the AHR it produced costs, not income. As a separate publication it generates revenue—in excess of $35,000 annually—that would vanish if it were reincorporated into the Review. Pinkney’s proposal, at least the part accessible to me, seems to have been drafted with out reference to its consequences for the Association’s finances. For three years Pinkney participated in the deliberations on the AHA budget as a member of the Council. Surely he cannot have forgotten the concern about deficits, a constant problem for well over a decade.
If the AHA actually has in prospect an annual surplus of $35,000, which I doubt, the Association would do better to spend than discard it. Why not expand the Review to 2,000 pages, making room for additional reviews and review articles but without sacrificing the part-its original scholarship-that has made the AHR the most frequently cited historical journal (see “The AHR Compared with Other Journals,” Perspectives, April 1985, pp. 12-13)? I suggested such an expansion at the Council meeting chaired by Pinkney in May 1980, but the proposition was summarily dismissed after a discussion that, I believe, lasted less than three minutes. Pinkney’s convention paper does appear to differ from his 1981 memorandum in one important respect. He no longer suggests that Association members should be permit ted to choose between the Review and the (as yet nonexistent) popular magazine of his tory. His decision to abandon this idea was wise. As I understand it, the purpose of that magazine is not to diminish the Review’s circulation but to increase public interest in history and perhaps generate a new source of income for the Association. If the venture, which I personally support, is successful, many members will want both publications.
We should hope so.
I thank Pinkney for having given me the opportunity to react to his plan for the next fifty years of the AHR in greater detail than was possible in my annual report.
Sincerely Yours,
Otto Pflanze
Indiana University
Suggestions on FOIA
Dear Editor:
In his article on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) (Perspectives, Jan., 1986), John Burke (Deputy Assistant Secretary, Classification/Declassification Center, US Department of State) notes that the act is poorly drafted and very costly. In addition, he points out that, recently, thousands of requests have been filed by one or two journalists who have the resources to manipulate the system.
He states that the time has now come to make “realistic changes” in FOIA. He suggests that “reasonable” limits be placed on requests from an individual, that FOIA be available only to US citizens, and that agencies be allowed to create “more flexible dead lines” and charge more “realistic fees where appropriate.” The purpose of the article evidently is to gain support from the historical community for these changes.
It is far easier to suggest “reasonable” limits than to define them. Twenty-five documents? One hundred documents? How will the historian who asks for material on the Suez crisis (an example used by Burke in the article) know how many documents he is requesting?
Limiting availability to US citizens also seems unrealistic. It is not difficult to call upon American friends to place requests. Indeed one can envision entrepreneurial graduate students placing advertisements in the international press and making a business of it.
As for requesting greater flexibility in deadlines and realistic (higher?) fees where appropriate, few historians receive more than a letter of intent within the legal deadline while recently the State Department has determined that the audience for scholarly research is too small to warrant a fee waiver. I would like to suggest two other ways that government agencies, in particular the State Department, can reduce costs, while keeping to the spirit as well as the substance of FOIA.
- The Department could recognize that with some few and specific exemptions, documents over the age of 30 years do not need to be closely examined by three or four people before being released. Existing archival practices used in processing documents sent to the National Archives would adequately protect third party interests, screen out files on intelligence information, etc. for 98 percent of the documents produced by the State Department. Allowing old documents to be treated as normal archival material would allow FOIA staffs to concentrate on more current documents, would encourage historians to wait for documents to reach the archives and would certainly be more cost
- The Department could provide the public with information about documents already released. The reluctance to provide access to computerized lists of documents that have been released or to the documents themselves no doubt reflects the apprehension of government agencies faced with disclosure of information. However, it has proved very costly. Not only are requests filed for documents already released, but there is little doubt that requests are filed for information which (given the copying machine) probably can be found in other documents already released through previous requests. If the State Department, the Defense Department, the NSC and the FBI simply placed a copy of every document released in the National Archives it would probably reduce the “fishing expeditions” that lead to voluminous requests, and would most certainly reduce requests for information that has already been released.
In general, the “realistic” changes sought by Burke are those that would close rather than open information. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that even if these changes were accomplished, those who wish to manipulate the system would still find a way, while historians would once again pay the price.
Sincerely,
Anna K. Nelson
American University
Stuttgart Response
Dear Editor:
In the December 1985 issue of Perspectives, Dr. Wilcomb E. Washburn’s article “History Died a Little at Stuttgart” appeared. It served as preface to a resolution presented to the AHA Business Meeting on December 29, 1985. I assume that an official description of that meeting will appear in your publication and thus, readers will learn that the resolution did not pass. I want to address myself to some of the issues raised by Dr. Washburn’s article that purportedly described a round table at the international congress.
The Round Table on Historians and the Problems of Peace Maintenance was chaired by Gordon Craig (Stanford), T. C. Barker (London School of Economics), and Sergei Tikhvinsky (Moscow). One small result of this round table was a vague resolution which asserted that historians had a valuable perspective, which “deserves serious consideration by national leaders” and asked “all national governments to implement a universal freeze on the production of nuclear weapons and a cessation of nuclear testing.” Craig and those who supported this resolution act ed as independent historians at the Round Table—no one was representing larger constituencies.
Prior to the opening of the meeting, the AHA sent out copies of a position paper drawn up by Tikhvinsky and others to American scholars who attended or planned to attend. When my copy arrived, I was annoyed but for different reasons than Dr. Washburn. This paper had not paid any attention to a vast body of scholarship developed over the years since 1945 on the problem of peace in history. My reaction was to pack up a collection of articles, offprints, and bibliographies, which I sent to Academician Tikhvinsky, but which did not arrive in time to reach the floor of the round table. Despite my reservations about the content of the paper, which was the central focus of the round table (the resolution was not), I was delighted to see the topic on the program. It had appeared in 1980 at Bucharest and was also to be discussed at another round table (Women and War in the Nuclear Age). Peace problems have been studied by historians as a serious sub-set of the profession and belong on international agendas. Indeed, the Geneva based Association Internationale pour l’ Histoire Contemporaine de l’Europe, an affiliated organization of the International Congress, devoted two days to the question of peace in European history at the Stuttgart meeting.
The resolution that emerged from the round table did not place the historical profession in mortal jeopardy. Dr. Washburn’s assertion that “history died a little” is only comprehensible as part of his Cold Warrior litany about Russian transgressions (which significantly omits all US interventions). The few minutes devoted to the ”peace resolution” by German television have had no significant effect in removing one cruise missile nor will they. Most people who sat through that meeting were hardly likely to have their opinions changed. Indeed, many in the audience did not understand a whit of what was going on because of severe language problems. The number of people wandering in and out during the four uninterrupted hours was substantial. But what was valuable was the occasional serious exchange of views that occurred. These exchanges continued at other sessions where the subject of peace history was on the agenda.
The death of history is not a likely result of this recent Stuttgart resolution. This death can definitely be expected, however, if and when nuclear war is attempted in the name of freedom or any other ideology.
Sincerely,
Sandi E. Cooper
College of Staten Island
