Washington Notes, March 1984

In the aftermath of the annual meeting and before the spring cycle of divisional committee meetings begins, the AHA headquarters is bustling with a variety of other seasonal activities. We are en­gaged in carrying out the various policy decisions and initiatives authorized by the Council in its San Francisco meet­ings, and we are supporting the winter meetings of two key standing commit­tees, the Nominating Committee, which meets February 9-11. and the second meeting of the 1984 Program Commit­tee on March 9-10. The AHA executive director and the NCC director are at­tending the February 24-25 meeting of the Joint Committee of the OAH, the AHA, and the Society of American Ar­chivists, hosted by the SAA in Chicago.

The Nominating Committee is chaired this year by Theodore Rabb of Princeton University. Its members serve three-year terms, one-third elected by the AHA membership each year. In the committee’s hands rests the entire re­sponsibility under the constitution of the Association for selecting candidates for all the vacancies in the elective of­fices of the AHA that will occur at the end of this year. This year the commit­tee has a large slate to prepare, address­ing vacancies for president-elect, a vice­ president, three Council members, three Nominating Committee members, three Committee on Committees mem­bers and three divisional committee members, one for each division.

Finding at least twenty-eight mem­bers with appropriate qualifications and, as the constitution provides, “having first ascertained that all candidates have consented to stand for election” is a heavy and arduous responsibility. While the committee properly puts the highest emphasis on candidates’ abili­ties, it is also aware of the need to represent as wide a segment as possible of our diverse membership—in terms of academe and nonacademe, gender and race, field of specialization, and geo­graphic distribution.

Our follow-up activities to the Coun­cil’s policy directives have been particularly intense with regard to the popular magazine of history project and con­cerning the broad matter of access to government documents. On the popu­lar magazine we have completed grant proposals drafted by the committee for the magazine, headed by Council mem­ber Bob Rotberg of MIT, and submitted them to appropriate foundations. A  ma­jor foundation has already made a sub­stantial grant for planning expenses, to include the design of a market survey for the magazine, and others are active­ly reviewing our submissions. We will have more on this  exciting subject in next month’s Perspectives.

Next month’s issue will also contain a Viewpoints article from a member as­sessing the multifaceted threat to the public’s (and historians’) access to government documentary material. Let us here merely note that the Council’s poli­cy statement on legislation concerning security classification has been widely distributed to interested organizations and government policymakers. The Consortium of Social Science Associa­tions and its member organizations are considering adopting a parallel statement. On February 8, the executive director represented the NCC member organizations and particularly the OAH and the AHA in testimony before the Subcommittee on Legislation of the House Committee on Intelligence, strongly opposing bills that would pro­vide partial exemption from the Freedom  of  Information Act for the CIA (see p. 3).

In other activities during late January and February, your headquarters staff is exploring a preparation of a centenary edition of the papers of J. Franklin Jameson, one of the giants of our first fifty years of existence. Early soundings with the Library of Congress, the Na­tional Archives, and the National His­toric Publications and Records Commis­sion, all organizations bearing the Jame­son imprint, have shown interest in the proposition. We also agreed with the Society for History in the Federal Gov­ernment to prepare jointly a second edition of the Directory of Federal Historical Programs and Activities on which we collaborated in 1980-81.

Department chairs will recall last year’s survey of the profession, sent out by the AHA headquarters, which made demands on their time. We have com­pleted an analysis of the data and now are in the process of publishing the results as part of our ISP service to institutional members. The data base consists of almost 600 departments (including 4000 faculty), which responded to questions on almost every aspect of department activity. We hope that this report will be useful to the departments in their internal planning and evalua­tions. The survey report will also be available for purchase by individuals. (Price and availability will be posted in the next issue of Pespectives.) We are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding a sigcant portion of the project.

Readers also will remember from our last issue that our fourth and final conference of the Constitutional History in the Schools Project is taking place in the Los Angeles area at the end of Febru­ary. The response to the publicity for the conference (in part due to the pro­motional efforts of the College Board’s West Coast branch) was overwhelming; the final selection of the sixty secondary-school participants has given us a group of extremely able and well-qualified teachers.

We have just submitted our final re­port to the Lilly Endowment, Inc., of Indianapolis on the Black History con­ference held at Purdue University last October. The papers of the conference are now being edited and will be pub­lished when completed by Louisiana State University Press. The AHA also will publish a pamphlet written by Pro­fessor Robert Harris of Cornell University on historiographical issues in Afro-American history. We are delighted by the outcome of the conference—and pleased also that the benefits of the Purdue gathering can be shared with the rest of the profession. The final product evidences the generosity of the historians who gave of their time to write papers and comments, of the members of the advisory committee, the teaching division, and headquarters staff who worked hard in seeing the conference through to its fruition, and of the National Endowment for the Hu­manities which assisted in funding travel of many participants.