Washington Notes, September 1988

The calendar assures us that the summer is over, deo gratia, since Washington like the rest of the country has been having a real lulu. As always the inter-term long holidays for so many of our members produce a certain lighten­ing of the schedule of meetings of AHA committees, which make up much of your headquarters’ regular September to May activities. The summer has not, however, been without newsworthy developments.

Certainly the developments likely to have the longest duration on your As­sociation headquarters is in the area of personnel. The May issue reported the retirement, after fourteen years, of the AHA’s first Controller. Eileen M. Gaylard, executive assistant and conven­tion manager over the past eighteen years, also elected to retire on August 31. Our new Controller, appointed by the Council’s Executive Committee, is Randy Norell, while Sharon K. Tune has moved up to fill Ms. Gaylard’s position. These two departures of valued and long­ term key staff members are a reminder that our one hundred-and-four-year old Association has repeatedly been blessed by finding able and dedicated staff mem­bers.

Over the summer, the AHA suffered a sharp check to its high hopes for a third edition of its classic Guide to Historical Literature, when the National Endow­ment for the Humanities informed us in June that it found itself unable to ap­prove our grant proposal. We are review­ing our plans with a view to improving and strengthening the grant proposal for resubmission this fall, but it is nonethe­less disappointing that we will have a year’s delay in the work program, if in­deed it is successfully resubmitted.

The Teaching Division Committee, the last of the three major Association operating divisions to meet, held its spring session in mid-April just after the May-June issue of Perspectives was put to bed. Its agenda dealt with a number of important items. The Committee dis­cussed in detail its plans for the first Dis­tinguished Teaching Award and procedures to be followed at its November meeting to make selection from a group of excellent nominees. It also decided to commemorate the late Eugene Asher, an ex officio observer-member on the Com­mittee from the Society for History Education, in making the initial Distin­guished Teaching Award in Cincinnati in December.

The Division also heard reports from the directors of the National Commission for the Social Studies, Dr. Fay Metcalf, and of the Bradley Commission on History in Schools, Dr. Kenneth Jackson, two important national commissions studying the state of teaching history and so­cial studies. Both bodies are making steady progress, and the Teaching Division Committee reaffirmed its sup­ port of the National Commission and recommended to the Council that the AHA support the Bradley Commission’s resolutions.

Also approved by the Committee was a plan to participate with the Association of American Colleges study of under­graduate majors’ programs in the humanities and social sciences dis­ciplines. The Research Division is also being asked to suggest additional AHA representatives to the project.

Finally, the Committee approved in principle a project to develop a directory of Black historians, analogous to the AHA’s very successful Directory of Women Historians.

In late April another committee meet­ing took place, when the Joint Committee on Historians and Archivists met. Repre­sentatives of the Society of American Archivists, the Organization of American Historians, and the AHA convened ini­tially at the National Archives building for an extended discussion with Don Wilson, the new Archivist of the United States, on the current program and plans for NARA’s future. The Committee then moved to the Dupont Plaza Hotel, where it addressed its usual busy agenda, in­cluding the election of a new chair Susan Grigg, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, representing OAH. Stepping down as chair was Deborah Gardner, Encyclopedia Project, New­ York State Historical Society, who served ably for the last three years in that capacity, while representing the AHA.

Another personnel change effecting the AHA, was the departure of Dr. Deborah Welch, founding director of the History Teaching Alliance, for a faculty position at Elon College. The Alliance is now situated at and firmly supported by the University of Florida, though continuing to be partly supervised by the three cooperating organizations, the OAH, the National Council for the Social Studies, and the AHA. The university asked the three societies to cooperate with it in the search for a new Alliance director, to be appointed to the university faculty. During June and July, through adver­tisements, correspondence, telephone conference calls, and a busy interview session, the ad hoc search committee was able to make a strong recommendation to the university for an appointment.

The above description of a few of the many cooperative projects the Associa­tion engages in with other organizations by no means exhausts that list. Over the summer months, headquarters staff made several trips to New York City to meetings with the American Council of Learned Societies, the Consortium of So­cial Science Associations, the Social Science Research Council, and other of­fices, chiefly of private foundations with an interest in the fields of humanities and of history. A busy agenda of Washington meetings by staff with the National Humanities Alliance, the Association for Diplomatic Studies, and the Association of American Colleges also filled out our dog days doings.