Washington Notes, April 1986

By the time members receive this issue of Perspectives, the spring meetings of our principal governing committees will be in full swing. The Nominating Committee has com­pleted its vital task, and its suggested slate starts on this page.

The  Program  Committee for the 1986 Annual Meeting program will have had its important final meeting, March 21–22. Fur­thermore, the Committee on Women His­torians met March 7, and its actions are reported on page 7, The three major divi­sional committees—Profossional, Research, and Teaching—met in late March and April; their activities will have to be reported in our next issue.

Behind these critically important bodies and their current agendas, which determine both the fate and the policy of the Associa­tion, are many ongoing activities,  which at some earlier time have been generated by or germinated in these bodies and launched into the world with instructions to the head­quarters staff to look after them and bring them up in the way they should go. Perhaps a brief review of some of the conferences and other activities scheduled, being planned,  or as yet just a gleam in the eye will convey to our fellow members a better sense of the AHA’s ongoing business.

In the fall, at Syracuse University, a major conference will mark the centenary of the death of one of history’s founding fathers­—Leopold von Ranke. Von Ranke was also the first honorary member of the infant AHA, which was organized in this country in 1884 by many of his former students. Syracuse University invited the Association to cospon­sor this endeavor, and the Research Division adopted it as a project two years ago.

In March 1987 a conference on Women in the Progressive Era, sponsored by the Com­mittee on Women Historians and the Re­search Division, will take place in conjunction with a planned major exhibition by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Ameri­can History on the same subject. We are also in the early drafting stage of two other con­ference projects, blessed by the Research and Teaching Divisions and the Council. One is a proposed careful look at the state of gradu­ate education in history, in which we expect to look at not only the teaching of graduate students but at the problem of communica­tion between our continuously proliferating family of specialized subfields, and at the preparation for teaching of the majority of graduate students who will make their historian careers in academe as teaching schol­ars.

The other predraft of a conference pro­posal is for a state-of-the-art conference on women’s history. We hope this conference will be just as successful as the conference on Black history the AHA sponsored with Pur­due University just over two years ago. It too will look both at how far the field of Women’s history has come in recent years and where it should be going in the future.

Also in the gleam-in-the-eye stage is a possible conference on an important oppor­tunity connected with the Columbus Quin­centenary, now only six years ahead of us. We await word from the NEH on our appli­cation to hold a series of summer institutes on the teaching of quantitative history, a byproduct of which will be the creation of teaching (software) materials. The proposed project was developed by the AHA’s Quanti­tative Committee and grows out of a success­ful planning symposium convened by the Committee at Amherst College in 1984 (Per­spectives, p. 22, March 1985). Readers of the March 1986 issue of Perspectives (p. 5) will have seen a status report on the AHA’s Moving-Image Media project, funded by NEH. John O’Connor, the project director, is editing a volume of papers presented at a symposium in the fall of 1985, and is now planning for a series of in-service media workshops that will lay the foundation for a permanent AHA in-service program.

AHA staff members have also offered technical support to a program of the Mer­shon Center of Ohio State University that seeks to strengthen the “world studies” cur­ricula in the schools. The interests of history are being well represented by Kevin Reilly of Somerset Community College in New Jersey, and Michael Gordon of Drexel University, who are developing materials that should help to improve the conceptual foundations of the world history courses as now taught in the schools.

Besides conferences, the AHA also spon­sors published collections. We point proudly to the recently released five-volume Guide to the Study of United States History Outside the US 1945-80, edited by Lewis Hanke and an international body of scholars, under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts and the AHA. The collected papers of the above mentioned Black History Conference, edited by Darlene Clark Hine, will be pub­lished in April by the LSU Press.

Leonard Rapport has completed the re­search for a supplementary volume to Max Farrand’s Records of the Federal Convention, being edited by James Hutson, which is spon­sored by the AHA and Project ’87 and fund­ed by the NEH. We expect it to appear in the constitutional bicentennial year 1987. And, finally, we have an ongoing AHA project to publish a collection of the letters and papers of our own John Franklin Jameson, which is being supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Let us turn to another major Association activity, which at its present intensity, is more recent than these other scholarly endeavors. Indeed one may argue that this other activity in itself is not a scholarly activity but rather one that facilitates scholarship. We refer to the advocacy effort of the Association, both on its own and in a series of collective efforts with other groupings of friends of learning. As members know we have many ongoing lobbying efforts and concerns, such as the National Archives and Records Administra­tion and its work, access by historians to federal documents, the declassification of those documents no longer needing protec­tion, and the welfare of the National Endow­ment for the Humanities, to mention only four of our many special concerns.

To this circle of deep concerns, we have now added the Library of Congress. As members will have noted from our last issue (p. 12, NCC News) the Library by a combination of adverse circumstances has been hurt by a severe cut of $18 million in its appropri­ations for this year, which has forced the truncation of hours of user access by nearly a third, the reduction in acquisitions by ap­proximately 25,000 items, and the cutting back of cataloging activities. Even more daunting is the prospect of further reductions under whatever form the current Congressional frenzy for automatic reductions untouched by responsible legislative hands (spelled Gramm-Rudman-Hollings and its future clones) may bring later this year.

Your Association is mounting a major ef­fort to reverse this trend and save the Library of Congress from permanent injury. We  have helped mobilize the Consortium of So­cial Science Associatons and the National Humanities Alliance, to both of which we belong. Above all our own historians’ Nation­al Coordinating Committee for the Promo­tion of History is taking a leading role. We produced witnesses for the hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcom­mittee on the Legislative Branch. Members are urged to communicate with their Repre­sentative or Senators to urge the restoration of funding to the Library of Congress. Many members who live in districts of key congres­sional players will be contacted by us in coming weeks to urge your direct interces­sion, for nothing is so poignant for a Member of Congress as a plea from his or her employ­ers—the home district voters!