January’s Washington Notes is always an oddity. It is prepared just after Thanksgiving while getting ready for the December annual meeting. The meeting itself, however, and two busy sessions of the Association’s Council at that event, still lie in the future. Yet, many of our readers will have all these events freshly in their memories by the time this Perspectives arrives.
Perhaps we can help fill the news void by describing just how each issue of Perspectives comes into being. During the last week of the second month preceding a Perspectives issue, an editorial meeting is convoked by the editor. It is attended by the AHA’s executive director and his deputy, the executive assistant and the editorial assistant. Potential stories are discussed, the problem of space limitation is grappled with, “must” items on our constitutional calendar are identified, and the precise content of the next issue is decided. Then the writing and editing is done, while the intervening issue is on the presses.
About half of the material which you read in Perspectives is not time-sensitive and is usually sent to our printers, Byrd Press in Richmond, as edited manuscript to be typeset well in advance of deadlines. The other more timely half, however, using our own hardware and software, is transmitted via modem direct to Byrd’s mainframe computer about the middle of the month preceding issuance. Byrd is also the printer for our annual meeting programs and for the American Historical Review, which is edited by our Bloomington, Indiana office as a joint effort of Indiana University and the AHA.
Activities by your Association headquarters staff during November and early December might almost be carried under the last topical heading of Perspectives since it consisted mostly of “Meetings.”
First, the Association’s own committees should be mentioned. The unsung heroes and heroines of the Program Committee met on November 7 to spend a long day and a half—and a good part of the intervening night—getting started on the program for our 1987 annual meeting. They will have another equally intense meeting in the late winter and innumerable phone calls and brief encounters before then. The end product of course will be the handsome, well-balanced, and comphrehensive program that you will receive in the mail next October. Although there is important staff support for the Committee, by ancient custom of the Association, the elected and appointed officers of the AHA refrain from meddling with the program’s content, so the full credit for every success belongs to the hardworking committee itself.
That same weekend the headquarters staff participated in Chicago in an important meeting of the Joint Committee of the Society of American Archivists, the Organization of American Historians, and the AHA. This committee is an important means of coordinating the efforts of the two chief historical organizations and of the archivists in support of the National Archives and of access to government records, and at limiting government’s inevitable yearning after greater secrecy.
Discussion in Chicago centered on the problems with the appointment of a new Archivist of the United States, the SAA’s proposal for a certification program for archivists, the NHPRC’s development of a national policy statement on our documentary heritage, continuing problems of access under the Freedom of Information Act, and reference policy changes proposed by the National Archives. The Joint Committee’s next meeting will be in Washington in the spring of 1987.
Late in the month the Committee on Committees, chaired by the president-elect, held its arduous meeting by means of an intensive and lengthy conference call. All of the Association’s standing and ad hoc committees—except for the three divisions, Professional, Research, and Teaching, the Nominating Committee, and the Committee on Committees itself—are filled by selections of the Committee on Committees confirmed by the Council. This year twenty-nine committee members, five alternates, and eight committee chairs were selected, reflecting a good geographic balance and a healthy distribution between the genders and ethnic groups.
Another conference call between the members of the AHA’s ad hoc committee on relations with the Italian historical profession was held the same week. It worked out a position for the Association’s representatives attending an important conference of the affiliated Societa’ degli storici italiani, on the theme for and timing of a future conference between the two organizations.
The list of other meetings can be briefly summarized to convey an idea of the range of the AHA’s ongoing activities. We were represented at the annual Ford Foundation’s doctoral and postdoctoral fellows’ conference at the National Academy of Sciences, which was key-noted by our former president, John Hope Franklin. We attended regular meetings of the executive committees of the Consortium of Social Science Associations and of the National Humanities Alliance. The executive director attended the fall meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies’ conference of secretaries in New Orleans, and participated in a conference sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and the Center for Democracy of Boston University on “Governance in Future Space Communities: First Principles.”
Finally, in perhaps the most historical of all these events, the headquarters participated in the ceremony of presentation to the Library of Congress of a facsimile copy of William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book by the British Ambassador. Ambassador Anthony Acland noted that this ancient document could appropriately be housed in the Library of Congress, since Domesday is also part of the American heritage. Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin accepted this handsome document during the ninth centenary celebration of its preparation, and noted its origin as a financial and tax assessment survey and referred to the recently enacted tax reform legislation of the ninety-ninth Congress.
