The Bradley Commission Recommends Stronger Emphasis on History
The Bradley Commission on History in Schools is making a year-long survey of the teaching of history in the United States. The Commission passed nine challenging resolutions aimed at strengthening the place of history in schools during its meeting in Reno, Nevada, March 24-25.
Based on their conviction that knowledge of history is essential for citizens of a free society, and that schools are not giving enough time to history, the Bradley Commissioners adopted nine resolutions, of which the following are the most critical: that historical study should be required of all students, whether or not they are preparing for college; that the kindergarten through sixth grade social studies curriculum be history-centered; that local and state school districts should require the study of history during four of the six years in grades seven through twelve.
In other resolutions the Commission recommended increasing the scope of the traditional history courses thereby improving their quality. The Bradley Commission also challenged university and college departments of history and education to devote greater attention to how they educate elementary and secondary school teachers.
The resolutions comprise the first of three steps the Bradley Commission will take showing a way toward excellence in the teaching and learning of history in US schools. The Commission received official support for its efforts from the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians and from the Organization of History Teachers at the Reno meetings of their groups. The AHA Teaching Division also has recommended that the Council endorse the efforts of the Bradley Commission.
For more information on all the resolutions and the Commission write The Bradley Commission Office, 26915 Westwood Road, #A-2, Westlake, OH 44145; 216/835-1776.
AHA Member Donates Collection of Works to the Library of Congress
Paul Avrich, AHA member since 1959, has given the Library of Congress an extensive collection of anarchist books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts, and memorabilia. Dr. Avrich is a Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York. He is one of the foremost historians of radicalism and has studied Russian anarchism for many years. He has formed this collection throughout the years to assist in his own research. The Avrich Collection is particularly rich in Ameri can and European publications issued after 1900, with a full range of important anarchist writers represented.
Two AHA Members Awarded Pulitzer Prizes
Robert V. Bruce, professor emeritus of history at Boston University, was presented the Pulitzer Prize for his work The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876. His book shows how a century ago the scientific commu nity and its achievements in the United States, now a world leader in science, were mediocre and unpromising.
David Herbert Donald was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for his biography Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe. Dr. Donald’s comprehensive biography of Wolfe, published by Little, Brown, and Company, details the correlation between the author’s life and his fiction. Dr. Donald is a professor of history at Harvard University and won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1961, also in the category of biography, for Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War.
National Archives Opens Nixon White House Central Files
On March 22, 1988, the National Archives opened to the public approximately 400,000 pages of records maintained by the White House Central Files Unit during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. The White House Central Files Unit is a permanent organization within the White House complex that maintains a central filing and retrieval system for the records of the President and his staff. The materials designated for opening to the public were selected from the Subject Files of the Central Files. The Subject Files reflect the di verse activities of the President and his staff and include considerable corre spondence with the general public and governmental officials, policy-making and policy- implementation documents, routine administrative documents, and materials relating to social events and the ceremonial aspects of the Nixon Presidency. For more information please contact the National Archives, Washington, DC 20408; 202/523-3099.
In addition Yorbalinda, California has been chosen as the cite for future construction of the Nixon Presidential Library. The Library will operate as an independent institution not affiliated with the NARA Presidential Libraries system.
AHA Controller Retires
The American Historical Association is sorry to announce that the controller of the Association, James H. Leatherwood, has decided to retire, effective July 30, 1988.Jim Leatherwood joined the Association as controller in 1975 from World Wide Wilcox, Inc., an air navigational sales and service organization, of which he was also a controller.
Born April 28, 1924 in Akron, Ohio, Jim Leatherwood received his BS degree from Southeastern University. He served in the Navy from 1941 to 1948 and saw much active duty in the Pacific and the Mediterranean during World War II. He married in 1943 and has two daughters and four grandchildren.
Jim Leatherwood and his wife, Erma, who is retired following thirty-eight years with the US Marine Corps., have built a summer home in Oak Grove, Virginia, with the intent of possibly spending their retirement there. Jim Leatherwood also plans to pursue his real estate business and his interest in antique automobile restoration.
Since becoming controller of the As sociation in February of 1975, the Association’s budget has doubled from about $600,000 to $1.25 million. Economic conditions of the early 70s caused considerable financial problems for the Association. The implementation of various cost-control measures and expanding of services for the membership contributed to the sound financial condition of the Association to date. Recent computerization of the Association should enhance overall service to the membership and ultimately stabilize headquarters expenses. As the first con troller of the Association in accordance with the revised constitution in 1974, the duties of Controller encompassed membership, procurement, security, and financial matters as well as the management of rental property of the Association. Jim Leatherwood served under two executive directors, Mack Thompson and Samuel R. Gammon.
“Major” Discrimination
Citibank recently abandoned a policy that denied credit cards to some liberal arts majors after students at the University of Califorina-Berkeley demanded the bank’s representatives be barred from campus because of their policy.
The students at Berkeley said they were denied credit cards because of their studies in art history, English, rhetoric, and languages. Apparently the Equal Credit Opportunity Act does not prohibit using a student’s academic major to judge credit worthiness. A report er for a campus newspaper The Daily Californian discovered the Citibank poli cy when she asked a bank representative how to apply for a credit card. The representative told her to fill in the credit application by listing business ad ministration or electrical engineering as her major instead of English.
International Teleconference Held at Tufts University
Students at Tufts University recently had the opportunity to participate in a teleconference with the Soviet Union. Tufts students discussed the nuclear arms race with two panels of experts, one from their university and the other at Moscow State University via satellite. Students at both universities listened to panel discussions and then were able to question the scholars. The teleconference was the first of three to be included in the “United States, the Soviet Union, and the Nuclear Arms Race in Historical Perspectives,” a course taught by Martin J. Sherwin. Professor Sherwin is an AHA member and director of the nu clear age history and humanities center at Tufts. He feels that for students “it’s important, exciting, and therefore very useful to hear what professors in another culture have to say about the same issue you’re studying and to hear from students who are your age and in class rooms similar to yours.” This type of exchange alters the way students perceive international relations, the sciences, and other subjects.
The teleconference at Tufts was the first time satellite technology had been used to link classrooms in the United States and the Soviet Union. As a result, many other U.S. colleges and universities are interested in using technology to enhance understanding with universi ties overseas. A national consortium of universities has assigned a committee to explore the idea, and some institutions have used advances in technology to hold international teleconferences using phone lines.
Copyright and Photocopying
The Copyright Office has recommended in its second five-year report to Congress this past winter that the 1976 Copyright Act be left alone in regard to the issue of photocopying. The Copyright Office concluded that “a reasonable balance” exists between competing interests in photocopying. The balance sought has been so successful, the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress wants atten tion to be turned instead to the impact of new technology on copyright issues.
Women and the Bicentennial of the US Constitution
November 8 to 10, 1987 saw over 600 men and women from thirty-three states gather in Phila delphia for “The Unfinished Agenda: Women’s Future Under the Constitution.” The conference was sponsored by Womens Way of Philadelphia. Keynote speakers at the conference included AHA members Gerda Lerner, University of Wisconsin, and Alice Kessler-Harris, Hofstra University. Cynthia Little, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, also an AHA member, served as the conference chair. Several of the other ninety speakers included Senator Paul Simon, Rep. William Gray III, Gloria Steinem, Jane Mansbridge, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Marlow Thomas.
The conference produced a set of resolutions that highlighted the need for women to act like the majority, to define and assert women’s values in public life, to recognize that children’s issues are inextricably linked to women’s issues, to use their voting power wisely and often, and to pass the ERA.
February 10-12, 1988 were the dates for “Women and the Constitution: A Bicentennial Perspective,” and brought such notable speakers to Atlanta as Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter, Lady Bird Johnson, and Betty Ford. The symposium was sponsored by The Carter Center of Emory University, Georgia State University, and The Jimmy Carter Library, and was officially recognized by the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution and by the Georgia Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution.
AHA members who acted as panelists or convenors at the symposium were Norma Basch, Rutgers University; Evelyn Brooks, University of Pennsylvania; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Emory University; Joan Hoff-Wilson, OAH; Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University; and Leila Rupp, Ohio State University; and Mary Frances Berry, Howard University, was on the National Advisory Committee.
The overall objective of the “Women and the Constitution” symposium was to create a legacy of the Constitution’s impact on women that will be distributed from scholars to school children in the form of research papers, journals, books, audio visual tapes, and museum exhibits. Educational materials emphasizing both a historical perspective and current issues concerning women in this country will be developed from the conference proceedings for secondary US history and civics classes. The papers and research materials from the conference will be donated to the National Archives.
Fellowships and Awards
Thirty-three of the 127 Mellon Fellows in the Humanities named by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation are history majors. The fellows will begin graduate study next fall.
Thirteen scholars were honored for outstanding publications at the annual meeting in Reno of the Organization of American Historians. Five of these are AHA members: Peter Kolchin, University of Delaware, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom; Marcus Rediker, Georgetown University, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750; Lucy Salyer, University of California-Berkeley, Captives of Law: Judicial Enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, 1891-1905; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and James Leloudis, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill—along with Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher D. Daly—for Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World.
