The Association and National Endowment for the Humanities Chair Sheldon Hackney will raise the contentious issue of American pluralism and identity in a panel at the annual meeting, which will be part of the endowment's "National Conversation" initiative.

AHA President Thomas C. Holt will chair the panel, at which Dr. Hackney will be the principal presenter. The panel will be followed by responses from Darlene Clark Hine (Michigan State Univ.), David A. Hollinger (Univ. of California at Berkeley), and John Kuo Wei Tchen (Queen's Coll. at City Univ. of New York), and comment from the audience. The session will begin at 5:30 on Saturday, January 7.

In announcing the "national conversation" initiative last November, Hackney called for a conversation that would "examine and discuss what unites us as a country, what we share as common American values in a nation comprised of so many divergent groups and beliefs."

This session is part of a much larger national initiative, which seeks to engage all Americans in a conversation informed by scholarship in the humanities. It will feature face-to-face conversations like the meeting session, along with films, museum exhibitions, seminars, and classroom study units that will be undertaken by a wide variety of groups and institutions (including schools, libraries, museums, community groups, unions, businesses, and service organizations) in "every state, city, town, and village in the country."