The latter part of January and the early weeks of February, at your headquarters, are chiefly devoted to internal business of the Association, and the planning for future projects and activities. Early February sees the important meeting of the Nominating Committee of the Association, a body elected by the membership at large, to identify candidates for the fall Association balloting for president-elect, a vice president, Council members, and vacancies on the Nominating Committee itself and on the Committee on Committees. February also sees the final face-to-face meeting of the Program Committee preparing for next December’s annual meeting in New York City.
Another vital activity of the Association is also the focus of a February committee meeting. The joint search committee of the AHA and the Indiana University to find a worthy successor to the editorship of the American Historical Review, is meeting in mid-February to complete several months work.
A full report is presented this issue (page 1) on a new and very promising initiative we are engaged in with the Organization of American Historians and the National Council for the Social Studies. This project, which was approved in principle by the Council at its meeting in Chicago, will lead to the creation of local alliances of secondary and post-secondary history teachers for the study of the Constitution. We are happy to report that the Exxon Education Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have informed us of generous grants to enable us to launch the project this year.
We are continuing to monitor several major appointments by the executive branch of the federal government, which are of importance to historians. The position of Archivist of the United States will be filled this spring with the appointment of a successor to Robert M. Warner, who has played the leading role in obtaining the independence of the Archives and who is a past member of AHA’s Council. At the invitation of the White House personnel office, Arthur S. Link, in his dual role as president of the Organization of American Historians and 1984 president of the AHA, submitted to the White House a short list of candidates for the position who are well qualified for the post and who would enjoy the confidence of historians and archivists. On another front, the White House in mid-January announced the nomination of William J. Bennett, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to be Secretary of Education, thereby filling one important vacancy of concern to our profession and creating another.
One present coincidence of the capitol scene is that many of the leading scholarly and cultural institutions in Washington are now headed by new appointees with ties to the historical profession. The single exception to the new faces phenomenon is Daniel Boorstin, our distinguished colleague who continues at the helm of the Library of Congress. We have mentioned the upcoming vacancies at NEH and the Archives. However, the Folger Library has enjoyed only the first months of leadership by another historian colleague, Werner Gundersheimer, late of the University of Pennsylvania; and Dumbarton Oaks is in the same situation with Robert W. Thomson of Harvard University. The Smithsonian Institution also has a newly appointed chief, Secretary Robert McC. Adams from the University of Chicago; though not a historian, Dr. Adams is an anthropologist and archaeologist with strong ties to history.
The International Research and Exchanges Board of the ACLS convened a January meeting of the commission of scholars, which represents it in negotiating biennial protocols with the Soviet Academy of Sciences commission for cultural exchanges in the humanities and social sciences. No less than five of our members were present to represent the discipline in three subcommissions: on history and archaeology, on the history, philosophy and social study of science and technology and on information and documentation problems in the humanities and social sciences.
Fairly frequently, the AHA office has the pleasure of receiving distinguished foreign historians making visits to the US under the auspices of the federal government’s international visitors program. At the end of January we had the pleasure of receiving Dr. Nasseredine Saidouni, Professor of History at the University of Algiers, on his first visit to the US. We endeavor on such occasions to present a brief overview of the state of the profession in our country, its organization, and the role of the AHA. Visitors usually depart with an armload of complimentary copies of the American Historical Review, Recently Published Articles, Directory of Affiliated Societies, and other AHA publications.
Much of the day-to-day activity of your headquarters is not always apparent to the membership. The first three months of the year is when Council and Division decisions on Association policy and actions are implemented. At the same time, we are busy preparing background information, helping to frame issues, and otherwise laying the groundwork for the many, many items on the Divisional Committees’ agenda for those spring meetings.
AHA headquarters is also a clearinghouse for profession-wide issues. Many are suggested in letters from members. On some we prepare background and briefing memos for our Divisions’ study. Others become the basis for more long term planning and possible AHA projects. There are always AHA projects to be managed and monitored to ensure that things run smoothly and in accordance with Association policy set by our elected governing bodies, the Council and the Divisions. . ;
We receive letters from AHA members daily, many of which require urgent action or various follow-ups of a firefighting and troubleshooting nature. Hearing from the membership is vital to the health of the Association. The Association is its membership, and it is fitting and proper that all matter of grievances, concerns, and “alerts” find their way to the Divisional committees for careful study and action.
And of course we are daily involved in the publication of your newsletter, Perspectives, which comes out monthly from September to June. The unrelenting pressure of back-to-back deadlines (We are actually reading bluelines for one month and draft copy for the next at the same time!) is felt by all the staff, who in their unique and separate ways contribute to the end product. For several days in each month the building vibrates to the hum of the second-floor editorial offices, where Marilyn Cole Finley, our newsletter editor, serves as stage manager and orchestra conductor extraordinaire, reducing sound, and sometimes fury, to music.
In the time left over, are other in-house activities, some of them truly major, that keep our platters heaping. We receive, edit, and publish pamphlets on a fairly regular basis. The Guide to Departments of History, an imposing volume that serves as the academic (and increasingly the public’s) directory of the historical profession, requires the most exacting editorial work and planning for about six months out of each year. We publish semi-annual listings of registered doctoral dissertation topics, and of course Grants and Fellowships of Interest to Historians. Our periodical, Recently Published Articles, and annual Writings on American History are year-round publications that involve AHA staff, with networks of consulting editors across the country.
From time to time we publish reports and occasionally books, sometimes with the assistance of university presses. The AHA’s Conference on Afro-American History, hosted by Purdue University (and ably directed by Darlene Clark Hine), is about to deliver an important book of papers to be published by Louisiana State University Press. And the University of Georgia Press has just published for the AHA an impressive addition (our tenth volume) to the American Legal Records Series, entitled Criminal Proceedings in Colonial Virginia (edited with an introduction by Peter Charles Hoffer, and edited and transcribed by William B. Scott).
The list goes on, but mention should also be made of some of the very valuable and time-consuming work that goes on outside your headquarters. It is simply not possible to appreciate the responsible work and great service of the many people who serve on the annual meeting Program and Local Arrangements committees until one has experienced it. Though we have just left Chicago with warm thoughts, New York and December ’85, with a new program and new arrangements, is just around the corner. The American Historical Review, the flagship journal of our profession, is a reflection not only of the great talent in history throughout the land but also of the talent of its editorial staff, laboring daily (and often nightly) out of the Review’s headquarters in Bloomington, Indiana.
