Historians Gather in New England ...

In the next few months, historians will hold two major gatherings in New England. The much larger Organization of American Historians will hold its convention on 25-28 March in Boston. Appropriately, its theme is"American Revolutions" and several sessions focus on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. As I mentioned here, the OAH's Journal of American History will publish a roundtable of six articles about the profession's ethical dilemmas in its March issue and, at the convention, the Organization's ad hoc Committee on Intellectual Integrity will hold an open forum on Saturday, 27 March. The committee, charged with making recommendations to the OAH leadership, is chaired by Karen Haltunnen of UC, Davis. Its members include: Richard J. Blackett of Vanderbilt, Laura F. Edwards of Duke, Michael Kammen of Cornell, Kate Torrey of the University of North Carolina Press, and Sandra Gioia Treadway of the Library of Virginia.

The Historical Society will hold its 2004 conference on 3-6 June at Spruce Point Inn near Boothbay Harbor, Maine. I wrote about The Historical Society here (scroll down to 31 May 2003). Appealing to the disaffected among us, it was organized about five years ago as an alternative to both the AHA and the OAH. Led initially by Eugene D. Genovese, it rejected the politicization of the profession and reasserted a central role for traditional forms of historical inquiry. In the intervening years, The Historical Society has had successes and failures. On the positive side, it publishes a lively The Journal of the Historical Society, edited by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and has sponsored a number of regional historical conferences. On the downside, The Historical Society has failed to meet several of its initial promises. It was to be a bottom-up organization, whose work would be largely conducted by strong regional organizations of historians, but it exists largely only at the top. If at all, its regional organizations survive only on the east and west coasts. Even they have no announced activities in 2004. In January 2003, The Historical Society launched a new blog, Historicale. Edited by Jeff Vanke of Guilford College, Historicale relied on submissions of"Prototype" of major projects, op-eds"For Historical Reasons," and"Critical History" reviews. The blog has not been updated since July 2003. The Historical Society was to hold its conferences on university campuses in order to make inexpensive housing available to graduate students. Graduate students, like everyone else, will pay $95 to $186 per night at the Spruce Point Inn. Nonetheless, considering this program, departmental budgets of professional friends of Gene and Betsy will do so.