Nothing is more tedious than stale snow-bound stories, since AHA headquarters lacks a John Greenleaf Whittier to make memorable Washington’s late January experience being “Shut in from all the world without.” Nevertheless, the paralysis that smote our nation’s capitol January 22 lasted for the better part of a week. It was not without additional fallout on our scheduled activities for the Association.
The office like the US government was completely closed for two and a half days. Over half of the staff managed to straggle in on two other days, since the second installment of the double snow storm q1me over the weekend. The executive director had the good fortune to be marooned at a small inn with a world-class restaurant in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains en route to a meeting, which had to be cancelled.
As members are aware, one of the Association’s most important roles is representing the totality of the historical profession in international activities. As a result, we are called on to participate in a number of activities in an almost ex officio fashion. Successive executive directors have served as chairs of a subcommission on history and archaeology of the International Research and Exchanges Board’s (IREX) joint commission with the Soviet Academy of Sciences for exchanges in the humanities and social sciences. (The AHA is uniquely honored in that three of its members serve as chairs of other subcommissions or commissions in the vitally important field of Soviet-US exchanges.)
In mid-January, IREX convened a meeting at Princeton, New Jersey of all the American participants in all of the bodies under its auspices that are now active in these exchanges. For our members, perhaps the most important observation is that the field of exchanges has taken on a new and broader emphasis. Momentum has never been entirely lost on the exchanges front even during the darker moments of relations in the last eight years, but a new emphasis is clearly discernible. Not only are history exchange projects flourishing and multiplying, but entirely new commissions in the fields of archival exchanges and education exchanges have come into being, both chaired by AHA members. On the history and archaeology turf at least seven and perhaps more visits, conferences, and meetings are scheduled over the next nine months.
As members are often reminded, the Association participates vigorously in three major advocacy organizations concerned in whole or in part with the interests of historians in the federal government. A regular feature of Perspectives is the column on the activities of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, which is our principal lobbying arm. Together, AHA with many other historical organizations and a small number of allied disciplines fund its operating budget. The NCC is able to operate with maximum efficiency by being “piggybacked” on the AHA. Its staff is on our payroll, and it is given office space in our headquarters building, together with other forms of in kind support. The AHA provides about one quarter of its operating cash.
We also participate in and contribute modestly to the Consortium of. Social Science Associations, which is the primary advocate for the broader social and behavioral sciences disciplines. As one of the charter members, the AHA provides a member of its board of directors. Even though its primary concerns are the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, it regularly assists us in matters relating to the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, and other legislative and appropriations concerns. We are also affiliated with the National Humanities Alliance, which is primarily concerned with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. Our executive director is serving as president of this body, which has just selected a new chief of staff.
Early in the month, the headquarters staff accepted an invitation from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to discuss its interest in curriculum development in the field of the history of science and technology. The AHA is no stranger to that field. The History of Science Society (HSS) and the Society for the History of Technology are long-standing affiliated societies, and the HSS is interested in holding its annual meeting in conjunction with ours in 1988 just as it did in 1984. But the timing of our January meeting was particularly fortuitous, coinciding with the publication of the article in the January Perspectives by John Servos on integrating the history of science into the United States history survey curriculum—the very topic of concern to NSF.
The 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to America is only five years away, and the AHA, under the leadership of its Committee on the Columbus Quincentennial, is taking steps now to address an issue of central concern to US scholars: the availability of and access to Hispanic archival records. We have secured funding support from the National Endowment for the Humanities to convene a special conference on this topic in early fall at the Library of Congress, our cosponsor in this effort. Conference chair Lawrence A. Clayton of the University of Alabama met with representatives of the three sponsors during the annual meeting in Chicago, and plans were made to get together again this issue month. By the time this reaches your mailbox, we expect to have finalized specific plans for the conference and to have commissioned papers. We will be inviting approximately forty historians, archivists, and librarians to ad dress this issue from the standpoint of both users and providers. The goal of the conference is to set an agenda and recommend priorities for reproducing Hispanic archival records not available in this country but essential to our understanding the Columbus Quincentennial and the influence of Hispanic culture in the United States.
