The Committee on Minority Historians met in Washington on October 2. It received with gratification word that the pamphlet series it is sponsoring on diversity within America, featuring summaries of the latest scholarship on the historical experiences of both men and women members of the most numerous ethnic minorities in the United States, is progressing rapidly. Temple University Press has expressed active interest in bringing out the series in hardcover volumes, just as it has done with two series sponsored by the Teaching Division on U.S. history and on global and comparative history. The committee focused on supplying further helpful guidelines to the authors of the diversity pamphlets series.
The committee also discussed the status of the fund drive to endow the new Wesley-Logan Prize to be initiated next year for the best book on the African diaspora and was reassured both by progress thus far and by prospects for the coming months. After discussing various activities to enlarge the flow of minority graduate students, it also considered the problem of retention of minority faculty in the profession and set up a small subcommittee to consider issues affecting continuity and advancement of minority faculty.
The Teaching Division met in Washington on October 9. It selected the 1994 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award recipient, to be announced at the January annual meeting, and discussed plans for a number of other potential awards for teaching and publications on teaching. In the process, the division amended the ground rules for the Asher Award to open it to additional nominations.
The division reviewed progress on the several pamphlet series on teaching specific fields of history, which it sponsors, and planned several additional topics. It expressed pleasure at the growing number of sessions related to teaching being organized and sponsored by affiliated societies for the January 6–9 annual meeting and began its planning for session topics for 1995 and 1996.
The division continued its monitoring of the K–12 special membership option and was heartened by the evidence of K–12 teacher members’ interest in a broadened rather than a restricted approach to publications supplied to members. It plans to build on the results of a survey of two-year college faculty members of the AHA to explore making additional publication options available.
The division was also pleased to have a meeting with National History Day leadership and to offer continued active support of this important program, which reaches some four hundred thousand participating history students in the schools and about twenty thousand teachers.