Sharing the front page of Perspectives, members will find the 1987 list of nominees for elective office in the Association, which has been drawn up by the Nominating Committee. Under our twelve-year-old, revised constitution, the elected Nominating Committee of nine members selects candidates for the offices of President, President-elect, and Vice-President for one of the three divisions; and vacancies on the Council, the divisional committees, the Nominating Committee itself, and the Committee on Committees. For each of these positions, except the two presidential offices, the constitution requires that two or more candidates be nominated, so that the electorate will have a choice. For the office of President, only the name of the serving President-elect appears on the ballot, but for the next President-elect, the constitution requires that two names and only two names be proposed.
Our constitution thus requires the Nominating Committee to take on a tough job: it not only must find qualified candidates for offices, it must find two or more candidates for every vacancy. It must also consult with each potential candidate by phone. The first question that any candidate asks, when queried by the Committee as to availability, is “who am I running against?” For obvious reasons the Committee always refuses to state. Whether old or dear friends, bitter enemies, or complete strangers are juxtaposed on the ballot, each can honestly say “I didn’t know” to the designated competitor.
As any honest peruser of our annual ballots can testify, AHA Nominating Committees do a fine job. As this page bears witness, the 1987 Committee has performed with distinction. Although the AHA constitution of 1974 provides that candidates can also be nominated by petition, members seem to feel that the choices presented are entirely appropriate—we have not had a petitionary candidate since it went into effect!
Your headquarters staff, during February and early March, engaged in a number of activities of interest. We completed negotiations with San Francisco hotels for our annual meeting there in 1989, and the Executive Committee of the Council authorized closing the deal. We also held meetings with representatives of Cincinnati hotels to complete arrangements to mark that city’s 200th anniversary in 1988 with our 104th annual meeting.
We participated in a celebration of the signing ceremony of an agreement between representatives of the Soviet central archives, the International Research and Exchanges Board (!REX) and the National Archives and Records Administration setting up a bilateral commission to promote and regulate exchanges between archives of the two countries.
Many important foreign visitors stop by the AHA headquarters. In February there were interesting visitors from Po land and from France. Dr. Zbigniew Swiech came in to learn more about historians and popular history dissemination in this country in publications and films. Mlle. Florence Rotter from the Conseil General de la Somme came in to discuss plans for a major World War I museum, being developed in the city of Peronne, France. We were able to introduce her to Dr. David Trask, chief historian of the Department of the Army, and together to supply her with many leads to follow-up both in this country and in France.
The Committee on Women Historians convened its annual spring meeting on March 6. Committee members Judith Walkowitz, chair, Nancy Schrom Dye, Barbara Engel, Virginia Scharff, and Ronald Walters met with AHA staff at the Dupont Plaza Hotel for a day-long meeting that focused on the CWH’s efforts to promote women’s history and further equity within the profession. The committee identified new topics for future “Roses and Thorns” columns, agreed to publish the results of a CWH survey on the status of graduate students, and planned a series of Perspectives articles on interviewing for jobs, mentoring, and other career-related topics. The committee also discussed plans for both the 1987 and 1988 annual meetings, including Howard University History and Law Professor Mary F. Berry’s acceptance of an invitation to speak at the CWH breakfast at this year’s annual meeting. Other topics of committee discussion included reports of sexual harassment in job recruitment, nominations for the AHA award for scholarly distinction and for honorary memberships for foreign scholars, gender-segregated sessions at the annual meeting, and several proposed projects on teaching and research in women’s history.
