The 1984 Annual Meeting of the AHA at the Hyatt Regency, Chicago, marked the Association’s hundredth anniversary. It was therefore appropriate that the United States Hotel in Saratoga Springs, where the AHA was founded in 1884, was pictured on the cover of the 1984 Program, and that the centennial was celebrated by the first convention banquet in recent memory.
The AHA Centennial Meeting was a decided, if not unmitigated, success. Past-President Gordon Wright spoke for many in his remark to the 1984 Program Committee, “If the sessions I attended were a fair sample, you managed to put together one of the best programs yet.” Some 2,700 people registered for the meeting, the largest number in recent years, exceeding the 1983 registration figure by nearly 500. Total attendance at the 1984 meeting was estimated at no less than 3,500. We would like to credit these numbers to the excellence and variety of the program sessions. But additional factors may well have contributed, such as geographical location, the consolidation of the entire program and its participants within the confines of one unusually large hotel, and the availability of luxury hotel rooms at incredibly low prices thanks to shrewd bargaining on the part of the AHA staff in Washington.
The AHA Council assigned responsibility for the construction of the 1984 program to a Program Committee of ten members representing a variety of historical fields and drawn from a diversity of academic institutions across the United States. The Program Committee members were C. Warren Hollister, chair, UC Santa Barbara (ancient, medieval Europe and Islam, history of science); James Kirby Martin, co-chair, University of Houston (US history); John H. Coatsworth, University of Chicago (Latin America); Robert M. Hartwell, University of Pennsylvania (Asia); Suellen M. Hoy, Dept. of Cultural Resources, North Carolina Division of Archives and History (public history and policy, women’s history); Carolyn Lougee, Stanford University (early modern Europe); Jacqueline Florance Meadows, North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (teaching); John Morrow, Jr., University of Tennessee, Knoxville (modern Europe, comparative history); Betty M. Unterberger, Texas A & M University (United States); and Richard S. Wortman, Princeton University (Eastern Europe, Russia). As program chair, I take this opportunity to thank and commend my co-chair, Jim Martin, for his skill in overseeing all the sessions relating to US history, and the committee members for their energy, efficiency, sound judgement, and unfailing good humor. Our meetings were both exhausting and enjoyable; although we sometimes disagreed, our tempers never flared, and as our work progressed our sense of mutual regard increased. I cannot recall working with an abler or more congenial committee.
Centennial Program Policies
The AHA Council, under the wise and imaginative leadership of President Arthur S. Link, proposed that the centennial meeting should include a number of special sessions built around major addresses by our most eminent historians dealing with changes in their scholarly fields over the previous century, or with the contributions of scholarly giants of the past to the present state of knowledge in their fields. The Program Committee adopted this proposal with enthusiasm, and its members set about to organize “centennial sessions” in their various areas of expertise. The committee also endeavored to develop a number of program sessions co-sponsored by the History of Science Society, which was itself celebrating its sixtieth anniversary and the hundredth anniversary of the birth of its founding father, George Sarton. As a result of dose cooperation between the Program Committees of the AHA and HSS, this initiative was carried out with unprecedented success.
I cannot recall working with an abler or more congenial committee.
Our committee retained many of the guidelines of the 1983 Program Committee, but not all. We continued the Council-man dated “no free lunch” policy of requiring all program participants except foreign scholars and nonhistorians to be members of the AHA, and we encountered virtually no resistance or audible grumbling. We welcomed co-sponsored session proposals from AHA Affiliated Societies, although we did not actively solicit them as last year’s committee did. The Conference on Latin American History was particularly active and successful in proposing co-sponsored sessions (including two centennial sessions), as was the Society for the History of Technology. Of the seventy-eight societies affiliated with the AHA, twenty-nine presented one or more co-sponsored session in 1984, compared with thirty-two in 1983. The active-solicitation policy of the 1983 Program Committee doubtless accounts for the difference, and the efforts of the 1983 committee, by reminding affiliated societies of the AHA’s continuing affection toward them, probably contributed to their relatively strong showing in the 1984 program as well. A total of thirty-one affiliated societies and groups ran announcements of meetings at the front of the 1984 program.
While continuing to urge the participation of women and minorities on the program, the 1984 committee encouraged the participation of historians of both genders in individual sessions. We welcomed and solicited sessions in women’s history, while remaining sensitive to the fact that historians of both sexes are contributing to all fields of historical scholarship. We were eager, too, to avoid the segregation of advanced doctoral students into those ghettos sometimes known as “dissertation sessions.” We tried to base our selection of papers and sessions on scholarly merit, not academic status. I hasten to say that none of my own current doctoral students was on the 1984 AHA program, but one of the better papers that I heard was delivered by a doctoral candidate in medieval history from the University of Toronto.
We also departed from 1983 policy (and reverted to pre-1983 tradition) by respecting absolutely the sanctity of the happy hour, and of the evening gatherings once known as “smokers,” now as “receptions.” Apart from the traditional opening session on the evening of December 27, all sessions were scheduled for either mornings (9:30–11:30) or afternoons—to end no later than 4:30. We did schedule a number of sessions for the afternoon of December 30 (the last day of the meeting, 1–3 p.m.), and although this decision prompted a few complaints, it was, I believe, necessary and reasonable—necessary to accommodate the number of good session proposals submitted to us, and reasonable because one can fly out of Chicago in late afternoon and arrive almost anywhere in the US at a reasonable hour. (It wouldn’t have worked at San Francisco.)
The Program
As it turned out, the 1984 centennial program included a total of 127 sessions, one of which, “History, Culture, and the City,” was cancelled when key participants sent their regrets. Of the remaining 126, twenty-four were centennial sessions, and these tended to draw the larger audiences. About 140 people, for example, stayed through the closing afternoon of the convention to hear past AHA President Lynn White and a panel of regional experts discuss “Religion, Culture, and Technology.” This Centennial Session, co-sponsored by the Society for the History of Technology and scheduled for the purpose of anchoring the convention’s final time-slot, was subtitled “A Centennial Session in Honor of Lynn White, jr.,” and quite apart from its own scholarly merit, it provided me with a most effective rejoinder to those who complained of being scheduled on the last afternoon: “Lynn White didn’t complain.”
It was with the intention of dropping an other anchor at the opening of the meeting, and establishing its centennial theme, that we reserved the evening of December 27 for a single, distinguished centennial session, “The American Historical Association: Historical Background and Early Years.” Chaired by past AHA President John Hope Franklin, the session included addresses by Walter Nugent, Peter Novick, David Van Tassel, and Richard Leopold exploring the intellectual and political circumstances of the AHA’s establishment and early growth.
The quality of the centennial sessions remained very high throughout the convention. Nearly 100 people attended Session 73, devoted to the AHA’s two best known past Presidents—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Session 27, featuring a centennial address by Peter Stearns on the impact of social history on conceptions of the past, drew an audience of more than 140 and evoked a lively controversy over the relationships between social history, the new political history, and diplomatic history in its various forms. Session 39, on modern French historiography in America, included no less than three former presidents of the AHA, one of whom, R. R. Palmer, delivered his centennial address, “A Century of French History in America,” to an audience of about 150. The comments of the three panelists—Rondo Cameron on economic history, David Pinkney on political history (inseparable from social history, he insisted), and William Sewell on social history as a force uniting American and French scholars—were followed by a vigorous discussion among proponents and skeptics of the new social history but, as Gordon Wright commented in his chairman’s report, undisturbed by “tiresome mini-lectures by compulsive talkers or cranks.”
An audience of comparable size attended the centennial session, “Beyond Consensus: The Problem of Synthesis in American His tory,” chaired by John Higham, with papers by Thomas Bender and Olivier Zunz and comments by Paul Boyer and the chair. Here again, the tension between political and social history provoked the audience and participants to heated discussion, lasting well beyond the scheduled time for adjournment. At still another centennial session, AHA President-elect William H. McNeill’s address, “Carl Becker: Historian,” dwelt on Becker’s creative contributions, his impact on the work of his students and successors (R. R. Palmer, Leo Gershoy, Louis Gottschalk, McNeill himself), and his prejudices. Becker’s strengths and weaknesses also emerged from the comments of the three panelists—Kevin M. Baker (“The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers”), Milton Klein (“Everyman His Own Historian”), and Mildred Alpern (Becker’s “Modern History”). The session chair, John C. Cairns, thought that, on the whole, “the shade of Becker may have been mildly pleased.”
Still another well-attended centennial session, co-sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America and the Charles Homer Haskins Society, concentrated on Charles Homer Haskins’ contributions to medieval history in America. The session almost disintegrated when last-minute circumstances prevented its principal speaker, Joseph R. Strayer, from attending. The session was saved by the quick thinking of its chair, Sally Vaughn, who herself was able to speak at some length on Haskins’ life and contributions, by the excellence of the panel (Marcia Colish on “The Twelfth Century Renaissance,” Edward Grant on “Medieval Science,” and David Bates of the University of Cardiff on “Norman Institutions”), and by the brilliant and extended reminiscences about Haskins delivered extemporaneously from the audience by Lynn White.
While no other centennial session quite equaled the Haskins session with respect to sheer suspense and perils narrowly averted, all were excellent; and it is with some regret that I find myself able to discuss only a few of them within the confines of this report. Nor should it be thought that the convention’s highlights were limited to centennial sessions alone. The first morning of the meeting was livened by a session titled “The Ideological Evolution of Sexuality as Related to Gender,” which attracted a capacity audience. The session was organized by Shere Hite (author of the Hite Reports on Male and Female Sexuality), who delivered the opening remarks; a panel of historians and anthropologists then explored the development of sexual self-consciousness and gender relationships from pre-history to the nineteenth century.
Another well-received session took the form of an experimental workshop: “Varieties of Historical Writing: A Circle of Encouragement.” It was organized by Sam Bass Warner, Jr. of Boston University, who joined five other writers of history in discussing briefly and informally their writing goals and experiences and then responding to questions from an extremely attentive audience.
About 140 people attended a session co-sponsored by the Medieval Academy titled “The Centrality of the Middle Ages” in which Dianne Hughes squared the circle by demonstrating a close relationship between usury and sodomy in medieval thought and iconography, Harry Miskimin urged that historians develop a uniform system of measurement for all recorded times and places, and Brian Tierney showed that the “judicial humanism” of the twelfth century was a major source of subsequent natural right theories. The intellectual virtuosity of Jeremy duQ. Adams’ commentary on the three papers, one of which he received less than an hour before the session, earned him general acclaim. The one flaw in the session, as its chairman Karl F. Morrison reports, was an “ill-tempered contribution from the floor, to which Professor Miskimin responded in a manner worthy of a scholar and a gentleman. For some reason, it was especially gratifying in that context to hear an economic historian quote poetry.”
The sessions at the 1984 meeting ranged across a diversity of topics that would doubt less have surprised the AHA’s founders at Saratoga Springs. To provide only a few statistics, five sessions dealt with the history of the AHA itself, one with sexuality, four with crime and violence, six with black history, one with Native American history, four with Jewish history, eleven with Latin American history, three with the Middle East, five with East Asia (including centennial sessions with John King Fairbank and John W. Hall), five with public and archival history, eight with science and technology, four with teaching, seven with urban history, six with women’s history, and two with the history of sports. One wonders how J. Franklin Jameson or Theodore Roosevelt might have reacted.
Glitches
Actual or potential problems that can arise in organizing and mounting an AHA Program are well illustrated by the vicissitudes of several 1984 sessions. The non-appearance of a central session participant is illustrated in the case of the above mentioned Charles Homer Haskins session; and the eleventh hour submission of a session paper, such as occurred in “The Centrality of the Middle Ages,” might well have daunted a commentator lacking the intellectual gifts of a Jeremy Adams. The problems of the late paper and the missing scholar converged to threaten session 54, “Rulers and Their Kindred in Pre-Conquest England and Normandy,” on the morning of December 29. The evening before, one of the three session papers arrived at the Hyatt Regency from Cambridge, England, along with the bad news that its author had dislocated his back and could not be present to deliver it. The paper was rushed to Charles Wood, the session commentator, who studied it overnight and handed it to me the next morning, just as the session was commencing, with the suggestion that I read it to the audience (of about fifty five) in its author’s behalf. I was compelled to read a paper I had never before seen, while sharing the platform with some of the bright- est and most articulate medievalists in the business: Donald Sutherland, Robin Fleming, and Eleanor Searle (President-Elect of the Medieval Academy). Such are the duties of AHA program chairs confronted with emergencies. I stammered through the paper but refused to answer questions about it.
It is my sad judgment, derived from association not only with this program but with many, that certain recurring problems defy correction and can only be dealt with as they occur through improvisation: the last-minute paper, the missing participant, the writing of bad papers from good abstracts, the scholar who rambles on far beyond his allotted time and is senior to the session chair, the crank in the audience (one ’84 session, co-sponsored by the American Military Institute, had to contend with “an unseemly demonstration by a small group, apparently numbering three persons,” so its chair reports). While most session chairs commented favorably on their sessions, and on the meeting as a whole, there were occasional complaints about one or another of the aforementioned problems, or about being scheduled into rooms that were too hot or too cold, too big or too small. Room scheduling is done by the AHA staff in Washington which, despite its long experience and good intentions, lacks the foreknowledge to arrive at exact predictions of audience sizes, much less room temperatures. Realistically, then, nothing much can be done about these problems, which seem to occur not only at AHA meetings but at all large scholarly conventions.
Recommendations
Despite the seeming sense of resignation expressed in the foregoing paragraph, I do offer some specific recommendations for the consideration of the AHA staff and Council and future Program Committees. My first recommendation has to do with the handling of recommendations in the reports of AHA program chairs. The timing of these reports is such that the chair of a Program Committee has already established committee procedures and presided at one committee meeting before receiving the report and recommendations of the previous year’s program chair. As a result, the recommendations of the 1983 program chair could have virtually no effect on the policies of our committee, nor could my own recommendations affect the operations of the 1985 committee. I therefore suggest either that the recommendations of program chairs be addressed to, and seriously considered by the AHA Council and Executive Director, or that program chairs not be asked to offer recommendations.
In the same spirit of hoping to gain wisdom from past experience, I suggest that the Council give serious thought to the advisability of choosing as program chair a person who has served on some previous Program Committee. When I and my committee began our labors, we had very little idea what we were doing. This difficulty could be avoided by selecting new program chairs from the very considerable pool of historians who have had experience on past Program Committees.
A third recommendation has to do with published deadlines for paper and session proposals. It has become traditional, I believe, to publish a call for papers and sessions each year in the September Perspectives announcing a deadline of October 15, and then announcing in the December issue that the deadline has been extended to February 15. This policy seems misleading. Its purpose, presumably to encourage the submission of sufficient proposals to make the fall Program Committee meeting worthwhile, could probably be better accomplished by announcing the February 15 deadline in the September Perspectives along with a cautionary statement to the effect that proposals submitted by October 15 (or November 1) will be acted upon at the fall meeting and will run appreciably less risk of being crowded out.
Fourth, the Centennial Sessions at the 1984 meeting were so successful as to suggest that broad, historiographical sessions along similar lines might well be solicited by future Program Committees. Such sessions tend to depend on the participation of the most eminent scholars in our profession, and to facilitate their participation, I recommend that the rule against participating in two successive years be waived with respect, for example, to past AHA Presidents and historians of comparable stature. As I understand, the purpose of the anti-consecutive-year rule is to widen participation in the AHA Program by denying ambitious historians the opportunity to advance their careers and feather their nests by participating frequently in AHA meetings. This purpose is an altogether reasonable one, but it obviously does not apply to the sorts of scholars I have in mind.
Let me conclude by expressing my personal thanks to Paul B. Johnson of Roosevelt University, Chair of the Local Arrangements Committee, and to the members of his committee, who did so much to make the 1984 meeting a success and a pleasure. I am grateful, too, for the wise counsel of our Executive Director, Ambassador Samuel R. Gammon, who ornaments the AHA with his intelligence, style, and good cheer, and who contributed much to both the efficiency and conviviality of our Program Committee meetings. Finally, I express my deepest admiration and appreciation to Eileen Gaylard, assistant to the Executive Director, whose quiet guidance was a constant help to us, and whose administrative talent transformed a stack of session proposals into a coherent, smoothly running program.
C. Warren Hollister
University of California, Santa Barbara
