November and December proved to be the season of the foreigner for the AHA headquarters. A steady stream of historian-colleagues from foreign countries stopped by the office, and several activities involving AHA relations with sister societies abroad took place during those two months. Of course, these international-relations events should be seen against the usual background of seasonal staff activity implementing actions taken by the autumn meetings of the divisional committees and preparing for the annual meeting of the Association and its two concur rent meetings of the Council.
Just to catalog the foreign callers over a four- or five-week period is of interest. We had one or more visitors from France, Great Britain, Italy, the People’s Republic of China, and the Federal Re public of Germany. A visit to the Inter national Research and Exchanges Board, in which we participate, by a delegation including historians from the USSR, was rescheduled from late November to mid-January-perhaps to avoid upstreaming the visit to Washing ton of General Secretary Gorbachev be ginning December 7. His program is still fluid but is not expected to include AHA headquarters. Certainly much of Washington is agog before the event; the Soviet Embassy staged a monster reception for almost 2000 guests to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution and to warm things up for the approaching summit, and even asked our advice about possible tourist attractions.
An important international historical event was the formal inauguration of the German Historical Institute of Washington under its new director, Dr. Hartmuth Lehmann, late of the University of Kiel and a frequent visitor to the US. The opening ceremonies were noted by several speakers as a symbolic closing of the circle. Professional historical training in the US began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century with the establishment of German-model seminars at The Johns Hopkins University, based on the work of Americans trained in the great universities of Ger many. Leopold von Ranke, who was the AHA’s first honorary member, was appropriately addressed by our second president, George Bancroft, as “Chermaitre.” Now, with the opening of the German Historical Institute as a center for German historical scholarship in America and of cooperation between historians of the two countries, the wheel has made a full turn.
In addition to remarks by Professor Lehmann, the program included contributions by Ambassador Ruhfus, who had arrived only three days earlier, by representatives of the German Ministry for Research and Technology, by Konrad Jarausch on behalf of the Conference Group for Central European His tory, by Robert Forster on behalf of the AHA, and by Gerald R. Kleinfeld of the German Studies Association, and principal addresses by Professor Heinrich August Winkler (University of Freiburg), and by our former president, Bernard Bailyn.
AHA headquarters staff also participated in the mid-November meeting of the Conference of Secretaries of the American Council of Learned Societies in Seattle, in the autumn meeting in Washington of the National Humanities Alliance Board of Directors, and in the annual general meeting of the Consortium of Social Science Associations.
A final annual meeting is scheduled for mid-December, just after this column has gone to the printers: the Association’s constitution prescribes an annual meeting between representatives of the Council and our able and generous trustees, who will review the status of the Association’s general and special endowments and seek policy guidance from our governing body. Early word is that the October cataclysm on Wall Street is not expected to have significant impact on our investment income and that the status of our investment portfolio is very healthy, notwithstanding the evaporation of the frothy top layer of market increases in those prudent and profitable stocks and bonds in which our trustees have invested the AHA’s funds.
