TrueBlue

Last weekend I went to Atlanta for the yearly meeting of the American Historical Association: nearly 5,000 historians, graduate students (many interviewing for jobs), and publishers.

The really good news is that winds—ok, breezes—of change were wafting through the historical profession, as more and more panels talked about historians communicating to a broader public, helping to train our students to be history teachers, and working with public school teachers. More of us seem to be recognizing that while Americans hunger for history, professional historians have been serving up unappetizing scholarship written entirely for ourselves—and that ought to change.

We (well, Historians Against the War) tried to put our association on record against the war in Iraq, on the grounds that denying entry visas to foreign scholars, suspending habeas corpus, making declassified documents secret again, torturing prisoners, “condemning as ‘revisionism’ the search for truth about pre-war intelligence”—all of which the Administration uses to conduct the war—violate the principles on which we base our teaching, research and writing. There was a good bit of debate, as some folks argued that we shouldn’t spend our “moral capital” as professionals on something we ought to do as citizens.

I argued that we should not have to check basic values about a civilized society at the door of our professional association. We passed the resolution, and the Executive Council of the organization agreed as well, but they decided to send the resolution out to the entire membership, since only about 100 people voted at the meeting. Here’s an article about the session as well as some video clips of the debate. TrueBlue appears in the next to last clip. One moving moment in the debate came when Staughton Lynd, who had offered an (unsuccessful) anti-Vietnam War resolution at the AHA meeting in 1969 (!) spoke in favor of this resolution—you can see him in a video clip as well. Thanks to History News Network for the article and the clip!

And finally, there was a wonderful session devoted to Yale University (my alma mater) in the 1950s and 1960s, and its firing of Staughton Lynd and Jesse Lemisch, two of the finest young early American historians in the country at the time. Here is a terrific, funny, provocative article about Yale at the time by Professor Lemisch, now retired from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 3:48 pm and is filed under History, Higher Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.