Backup of Highlights of the 2010 Convention

HNN Daily Reports

• Day 1

Related Links

• HNN Coverage: Past AHA & OAH Conferences

News

• San Diego Tsunami
  

• A Grim Year on the Academic Job Market for Historians
  

• Historians embroiled in present-day battle
  

• Smaller AHA This Year
  

• More Labor Pains at the AHA
  

• Sympathetic Labor Pains for Recent Ph.Ds
  

• Checking in on the AHA?
  

• AHA annual convention will feature many politically relevant panels
  

• It's official: AHA will make an issue of gay marriage at its San Diego meeting
  

• AHA Convention: Leading Historians to Address Changing Ideas of Marriage and Family Across Time and Place
  

• Looking Forward to the 124th Annual Meeting in San Diego
  

Bloggers

• Who's a Historian to the AHA?
  

• Marc Bousquet to Robert Townsend: Huh?
  

• David Beito: Historians Against the War (For Progressives Only, Libertarians Not Welcome)
  

• Interviewing at the AHA
  

• Historian Dan Cohen laments small number of panels on digital history at the AHA convention
  

Day 1: Thursday January 7, 2010

With metaphorical storm clouds on the horizon of this year’s annual AHA meeting in San Diego, one fact is indisputable: the actual weather is phenomenal. While much of the rest of the country is experiencing highs more suitable to an icebox, the forecast for southern California is positively balmy. This morning, temperatures hit the mid-60s, and there is even a possibility that the high will reach above 70 sometime during the convention – weather more suited for seersucker than tweed.

Despite the pleasant clime, there are weighty issues on the docket at the AHA. Attendance is down, due to the bad economy, bleak job prospects for aspiring academics, and a distant conference location from many AHA members on the East Coast, according to AHA Executive Director Arnita Jones. Since the publication of Robert Townsend’s report on the job market earlier this week, the blogosphere has been abuzz with comments on the worsening situation.

Another big question on everyone’s mind at the AHA is the controversy surrounding the location of the convention at the Manchester Grand Hyatt. As attendees of last year’s conference will remember, Douglas Manchester, the owner of the Grand Hyatt, contributed $125,000 to the successful Proposition 8 campaign to ban gay marriage in the state of California. Gay-rights activists have called for a boycott of the hotel, an unclear factor in the low attendance numbers. Because of the expenses involved in canceling the convention, which has been pre-booked at the Grand Hyatt since 2003, the AHA decided to embark on a radical course – to feature a 15-panel threaded “mini-conference,” which, in a departure for the AHA, will be open to the public. The local media has already taken notice – this morning’s San Diego Union-Tribune ran convention coverage as its leading story, and local TV station San Diego 6 interviewed AHA Executive Director Arnita Jones about the public focus of the conference.

Despite the efforts by the AHA to publicize its LGBTQ panels, a protest is planned for tomorrow afternoon in front of the hotel by boycott backers. Historians Against the War, embroiled in its own controversy due to a recent statement by David Beito accusing the organization of bias against its libertarian members, will be holding a session in the adjacent Marriott in order to honor the boycott.

Easily one of the most popular sessions from today was Session #3: Is Google Good for History? Chaired by Shawn Martin of the University of Pennsylvania, and featuring the historian Dan Cohen of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Paul Duguid of UC – Berkeley’s School of Information, and Brandon Badger, one of Google’s engineers and a prominent figure in the Google Books project. The conversation was generally friendly, and the answer to the question on the part of all panels was an emphatic yes.

Professor Cohen and Professor Duguid, however, were not hesitant to sometimes harshly criticize Google Books. Professor Duguid declared that Google Books is good for history, but it is not good enough for history. In this from his address, Professor Duguid addresses Google Books’ problems with metadata, that is to say information about a book that Google either distorts or misidentifies:

Another concern was voiced during the question-and-answer session by Andrew Lee, a graduate student and librarian at NYU, who worried that Google Books, because it is such a convenient tool, will cause students to become overdependent on it, especially when it comes to foreign-language material. A student could come to him and say that “I can’t find anything on Google about… [the the Turkish removal of Greeks after ]… if they don’t know Turkish [or] Greek, Google Books isn’t going to help them."

With the job crisis, a boycott, scheduled protests, and a smaller-than-usual turnout, the situation may appear to onlookers to be grim. The mood in San Diego, however, is generally positive. The official opening of the meeting on Thursday night featured a session, introduced by AHA President and Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, on"Musical Encounters in the Early Atlantic," which included musical performances and sound excerpts to convey to the audience a sense of different aural sensations throughout history.

Another part of the overall sense of levity among participants no doubt stems from the surroundings. AHA-goers are spread out in several different hotels along the beautiful San Diego coast – befitting a convention with the theme “Oceans, Islands, Continents.” Many historians are staying at alternative venues than the Grand Hyatt, either out of courage of their convictions or because the Hyatt was simply filled up. On the to-do list for most is to enjoy the beach and pool facilities – the Marriott in particular has a gigantic tropical-themed pool area, and, while conventioneers do not typically wear their credentials in the water, at least one historian was overheard to declare: “After my presentation, I’m hitting the pool!”

With three more days of the AHA meeting ahead, that doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.