American Historical Association

The American Historical Society announces its 2020 awards

/ johnfea

Here are a few that might be of interest to readers of The Way of Improvement Leads Home:

Award for Scholarly Distinction: David Levering Lewis, New York University.

Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award: Robert D. Johnson, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Herbert Feis Award in Public History: Valerie Paley, Center for Women’s History, New-York Historical Society

Allen K. Breveridge Award in American History: Jeremy Zallen, Lafayette College for American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865 (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

Raymond J. Cunningham Prize for Undergraduate Journal Article: Jubilee Marshall, Villanova University (BA, 2019): “Race, Death, and Public Health in Early Philadelphia, 1750–1793,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies (Spring 2020).

Littleton-Griswold Prize in US Legal History: Sara Seo, Columbia Law School for Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom

John O’Connor Film Award for Dramatic Feature: Harriet

James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History: Sophie White, University of Notre Dame for Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana

James Harvey Robinson Prize for Teaching AIDS: Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Ohio State University for Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement

Click here for a list of all the winners.

The American Historical Association responds to Trump’s White House American History event

/ johnfea

Here it is:

On September 17, the White House announced, “In commemoration of Constitution Day, President Trump will travel to the National Archives to participate in a discussion on the liberal indoctrination of America’s youth through the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, and other misleading, radical ideologies with a diverse group of professors, historians, and scholars. The President will deliver remarks on his Administration’s efforts to promote a more balanced, accurate, and patriotic curricula in America’s schools.”

This hastily assembled “White House Conference on American History” took place in the Rotunda of the National Archives, although the National Archives and Records Administration had no role in organizing the program. The organizers of the event neither informed nor consulted associations of professional historians. 

The American Historical Association addresses this “conference” and the president’s ill-informed observations about American history and history education reluctantly and with dismay. The event was clearly a campaign stunt, deploying the legitimating backdrop of the Rotunda, home of the nation’s founding documents, to draw distinctions between the two political parties on education policy, tie one party to civil disorder, and enable the president to explicitly attack his opponent. Like the president’s claim at Mount Rushmore two months ago that “our children are taught in school to hate their own country,” this political theater stokes culture wars that are meant to distract Americans from other, more pressing current issues. The AHA only reluctantly gives air to such distraction; we are not interested in inflating a brouhaha that is a mere sideshow to the many perils facing our nation at this moment. 

Past generations of historians participated in promoting a mythical view of the United States. Missing from this conventional narrative were essential themes that we now recognize as central to a complete understanding of our nation’s past. As scholars, we locate and evaluate evidence, which we use to craft stories about the past that are inclusive and able to withstand critical scrutiny. In the process, we engage in lively and at times heated conversations with each other about the meaning of evidence and ways to interpret it. As teachers, we encourage our students to question conventional wisdom as well as their own assumptions, but always with an emphasis on evidence. It is not appropriate for us to censor ourselves or our students when it comes to discussing past events and developments. To purge history of its unsavory elements and full complexity would be a disservice to history as a discipline and the nation, and in the process would render a rich, fascinating story dull and uninspiring.

The AHA deplores the use of history and history education at all grade levels and other contexts to divide the American people, rather than use our discipline to heal the divisions that are central to our heritage. Healing those divisions requires an understanding of history and an appreciation for the persistent struggles of Americans to hold the nation accountable for falling short of its lofty ideals. To learn from our history we must confront it, understand it in all its messy complexity, and take responsibility as much for our failures as our accomplishments.

Read the cosigning organizations here.

The American Historical Association cancels its annual meeting

/ johnfea

AHAlogo

No, it is really cancelled, as in “not taking place.” 🙂  It looks like I am not going to Seattle in January.

Here is the AHA letter sent today to its affiliate societies:

Dear Colleagues

After careful deliberation, the American Historical Association has determined that it will be impossible to hold the annual meeting in Seattle from January 7–10, 2021, as originally planned. The best available information from public health authorities and medical experts, including the latest guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and state and local authorities, suggests that the global health crisis will not be sufficiently resolved by January. It is likely that travel restrictions will remain in place and a large gathering of people from around the country and the world will pose a health risk. Given the likely risks involved in meeting in person, as well as financial constraints facing many of our members, we believe that if a meeting were held the attendance would be sparse at best. With regret, the Association has concluded that canceling the face-to-face meeting is necessary to maintain the health and safety of our members, our staff, and the public.

We do not make this decision lightly, as we know how important the annual meeting is to the discipline. Members rely on the opportunity to meet in person to build professional relationships, share their scholarship, and engage in professional development. While we will not be able to connect in person, the AHA staff is preparing a variety of web-based programming over the next 10 months to continue to bring together our communities of historians to further advance our mission. We welcome your ideas and will keep in touch as our plans evolve.

A PDF program, documenting all sessions accepted by the AHA Program Committee and the affiliated societies, will be posted on the AHA website in the fall so that participants can document their expected participation for their CVs. Anyone who was expecting to read a prepared presentation will have the opportunity to post written remarks on the AHA website.

We appreciate your patience and continued work on your plans for the annual meeting program. We are disappointed that we will be unable to meet face to face.

Information for Affiliates

If you are interested in developing virtual programming, we will be happy to publicize your sessions and events, and to share what we learn from our experience with webinars and other online events. We also welcome any creative ideas you have—feel free to contact us at annualmeeting@historians.org if you have any ideas to share or questions that we can answer.

We will be sharing this news widely over the next few days. However, we will not email participants on affiliated society sessions directly about their sessions, in case you need time to think through how you would like to proceed. You may contact them after today if you would like.

You should notify participants that canceled conference presentations should be included on their CVs as “scheduled for the 2021 AHA annual meeting.”

Please let us know if you plan to develop virtual programming so we can keep in touch during the planning process.

We know you will have many questions; please see our FAQs for further information. The FAQs will be updated regularly as our planning continues.

With Thanks

The Council and staff also want to express our deep gratitude for the hard work already done by the Program Committee, chaired by Jared Poley and Lisa Brady, our affiliated societies, and those who organized and submitted sessions. While we can’t be together in Seattle, we will find ways to take advantage of the exciting program they have developed.

We hope that you stay safe and healthy in these difficult times, and look forward to sharing more information in the coming weeks.

Debbie Ann Doyle

Meetings Manager

The State of the History Job Market

/ johnfea

History

The number of full-time faculty jobs in history has declined over the past year, but the history job market appears to be stabilizing. The number of Ph.D.s in history is dropping.

Here is Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed:

The new data appeared in the American Historical Association’s annual jobs report, released Wednesday. The report is based on jobs posted to the AHA Career Center and the separate H-Net Job Guide. About 25 percent of historians work outside academe, so the report does not reflect the entire jobs outlook, but it is considered representative of overall disciplinary trends.

“We may have reached a point of stability in the academic job market,” reads the report, written by Dylan Ruediger, an AHA staffer. During the 2018-19 hiring cycle, the AHA Career Center hosted ads for 538 full-time positions, making for a 1.8 percent decline year over year.

Read the entire piece here.

Undergraduate Enrollments in History Courses Remain Steady

/ johnfea

History

Good news from the American Historical Association:

Ask any department chair, and most faculty, what the most vexing data point during the academic year is and the most likely answer would be “enrollments.” In a data-obsessed age when it seems everything is tracked and analyzed, few data points matter as much in higher education as enrollments. For many institutions, department funding is tied directly to enrollment numbers. Courses that don’t meet minimum enrollment requirements are canceled, snarling the distribution of teaching responsibilities among faculty and narrowing the intellectual range in the curriculum. Fluctuations in enrollments and majors—a close relative of enrollments data—are cited as reasons to create or cancel tenure lines. A lot is riding on what academic slang calls “butts in seats.”

For the past several years, the AHA has conducted an optional annual enrollments survey of history departments. The inquiry, which asks participating departments to report enrollments for each of the previous four years, is the only available source that collects history-specific enrollments data from individual institutions. While not statistically representative of higher education as a whole, these data capture broad national trends. With the data’s limitations firmly in mind, we’re parsing this year’s survey in the context of wider efforts across the discipline and across the landscape of higher education to better articulate the value of studying history and the humanities. 

Undergraduate enrollment in history courses remained relatively stable in 2018–19, with a total decline of 1.1 percent from 2017–18 levels across the 104 US institutions that provided data to the AHA (Fig. 1). When responses from two Canadian institutions are included, the dip was just 0.8 percent overall. The four-year trends reported in our 2019 survey show a decline of 3.3 percent since the 2015–16 academic year. The modest change from 2017–18 reinforces the flattening trend we observed last year and is slightly lower than national declines in total undergraduate enrollment, according to recent data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Our enrollment survey corroborates a sense reported at many departments that the years of free-falling undergraduate enrollment may be behind them. 

Read the rest here.

American Historical Association James Grossman on Research Access and Scholarly Equity

/ johnfea

Here is Grossman at Perspectives on History:

Access to research materials—both print and digital—is crucial for any historian engaged in scholarship and teaching. For historians working outside of well-resourced colleges and universities, gaining access to these materials has become increasingly difficult, particularly with the increasing breadth and depth of commercial databases often accessible only to scholars affiliated with a well-resourced university.

This trend is an often-overlooked aspect of the changing landscape of historical research. More and more research material has been digitized by commercial database companies, who then control its dissemination. These firms rely on institution-to-institution contracts with large, well-funded university libraries. Historians working within these universities have full access, while those on the outside are excluded, placing them at a severe disadvantage in their ability to produce first-rate scholarship and excel as teachers. For a complex set of reasons, providers rarely offer individual subscriptions to scholarly databases. At the same time, contracts with vendors often make it difficult (or even impossible) for libraries to grant access to individuals outside these institutions. These structural barriers create difficult challenges for many historians.

And this:

The AHA encourages history departments to provide full library access to their own scholar alumni and to unaffiliated historians in their regions. History departments and academic units can play a positive role by supporting the scholarship of their alumni and by bringing more unaffiliated scholars into their orbit. Providing these historians a university affiliation—whether as a visiting scholar or by whatever means is feasible—will help close the gap between those with and without adequate research access. These actions will enable every historian to fully realize their potential as scholars and contributors to our discipline.

Read the entire piece here.

I can really relate to this post.  For the past two or three years, I have been trying to work with the Adam Matthew digitized CO5 files from the National Archives, UK.  This database offers access to thousands of documents on North America from 1606-1822.  I can’t afford to go to London to view these documents, so the database is my only option.  These documents are absolutely essential for my current book project.  At some point I am going to have to bite the bullet and go to London or find a research university who will let me use their collection on site or give me a password.

I realize that I have been blessed at Messiah College.  Early in my tenure, the college library purchased the Readex Early America Imprints I, Early American Imprints II (Shaw-Shoemaker), and Early American Newspapers.  This gives my students access to thousand and thousands of primary sources.  These databases have been amazing resources for my own work as well.  Messiah’s library staff has also managed to get trial access to the Adam Matthew CO5 files, but the trials are limited in time and scope and it is always hard to find time to do research during the academic year. The college cannot afford to purchase this database and Adam Matthew will not allow an individual subscription.

I also realize that I am privileged to have an academic job that gives me access to library resources.  I regularly use the databases, e-books, search engines, and interlibrary loan services that the Murray Library offers to the Messiah College community.  Grossman calls attention in the piece to adjunct and contingent faculty who lose access to these resources when they stop teaching or are not rehired.

I appreciate Grossman’s call for Research I History Departments to grant access to alumni.  Unfortunately, my Ph.D-granting institution doesn’t even own the databases I have noted in this post.

I’ll keep working on this one.  If anyone can help, please let me know: jfea(at)messiah(dot)edu.

Historians Approve Anti-ICE Resolution

/ johnfea

AHA2020 Carousel Slide test

At its annual meeting in New York City, the American Historical Association approved the following resolution:

RESOLUTION CONDEMNING AFFILIATIONS BETWEEN ICE AND HIGHER EDUCATION

In light of the serious and systematic violation of human rights committed by both the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US Border Patrol (USBP) in recent years—and considering their presence on US university campuses for recruitment and research purposes—we resolve the following:

WHEREAS, several US universities have contracts with and host recruitment for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US Border Patrol (USBP); 

WHEREAS, ICE and USBP have been cited for numerous human rights abuses at the border and in detention facilities; 

WHEREAS university contracts with ICE and USBP legitimate both agencies as a branch of government and potential employers; therefore, be it

Resolved, that the AHA urge university faculty, staff, and administrators to sever existing ties and forgo future contracts with ICE and USBP; and

Resolved,that the AHA support sanctuary movements on campuses that seek to protect immigrant students and workers.

I am not sure what this resolution has to do with the study of history.  If I was present I would have rejected it. The AHA is not a political organization.  In this sense, I am mostly in agreement with the former AHA president and Cornell University historian Mary Beth Norton.  Here is a taste of a recent piece at Inside Higher Education:

Members of the American Historical Association approved a resolution condemning college and university contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 70 to 60, at their annual meeting over the weekend. They approved an additional statement in support of professors teaching off the tenure track, but voted down two resolutions expressing concern about academic freedom in Israel.

The successful resolution on ICE now goes to the AHA’s governing council for further consideration. Per association policies and procedures, the council may accept it, refuse to concur or exercise a veto.

Alexander Avina, associate professor at Arizona State University, was the first to speak in favor of the resolution, saying that his own parents were undocumented migrants and that he now teaches such immigrants in the borderlands. He urged the AHA to take “a stand against ongoing state terrorism” and the idea that universities should make millions of dollars by working with agencies that perpetrate it.

Ashley Black, a visiting assistant professor of history at California State University at Stanislaus, said she teaches students who were part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and who now live in a “state of fear and insecurity.” She asked the AHA to endorse campuses as sanctuaries in the interest of student safety and learning.

ICE had no vocal fans in the room, but a number of historians spoke out against the resolution on the grounds that it strays from AHA’s mission and established rules and practices. Mary Beth Norton, former AHA president and Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emerita at Cornell University, said she might support a resolution that adhered to the AHA’s Guiding Principles on Taking a Public Stance, highlighting threats to historical sources, academic freedom and historians’ movement. Yet she did not support the resolution as written.

Norton said later that the document said “nothing about historical scholarship or historians. Accordingly, it is outside the purview if the AHA as an organization, even though expressing outrage about ICE is entirely appropriate for individual historians in their capacity as citizens.”  

Avina said that he and his colleagues behind the resolution hope that the council will “accept and publicly support” it.

Read the entire piece here.

It is Time for a President of the American Historical Association Who Does Not Work at a Research University

/ johnfea

AHA2020 Carousel Slide testNOTE:  This is a revised version of a post I wrote in January 2013.

What do all of these former American Historical Association presidents have in common?

2020: Mary Lindemann: University of Miami

2019: J.R. McNeil: Georgetown University

2018: Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University

2017: Tyler Stovall, University of California-Santa Cruz

2016: Patrick Manning, University of Pittsburgh

2015: Vicki Ruiz, University of California-Irvine

2014: Jan Goldstein, University of Chicago

2013: Kenneth Pomeranz, University of Chicago

2012: William Cronon, University of Wisconsin

2011: Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

2010: Barbara Metcalf, University of Michigan

2009: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard University

2008: Gabrielle Spiegel, Johns Hopkins University

2007: Barbara Weinstein, University of Maryland

2006: Linda Kerber, University of Iowa

2005: James Sheehan–Stanford University

2004: Jonathan Spence, Yale University

2003: James McPherson, Princeton University

2002: Lynn Hunt, UCLA

2001: William Roger Louis, University of Texas at Austin

2000: Eric Foner, Columbia University

1999: Robert Darnton, Princeton University

1998: Joseph C. Miller, University of Virginia

1997: Joyce Appleby. UCLA

Apart from the fact that they are outstanding and groundbreaking scholars, they were all teaching at research universities while they served as president of the American Historical Association.  In fact, the last president of the AHA who did not teach at a research university was Nellie Nielson. She was president in 1943.  Nielson, who also happened to be the first female president of the AHA, spent most of her career at Mt. Holyoke College, a liberal arts college for women in South Hadley, MA.

I can understand why so many AHA presidents come from research universities.  They have time to write, produce, and thus make a name for themselves in the profession.  But I wonder if it is time to buck this trend.

Back in 2012,  William Cronon urged the profession to reconnect with the public through teaching, the Internet, and other digital efforts.  I know that Cronon’s interests reflect the interests of the AHA staff.  They are building a larger tent that covers not just academics who write award-winning books, but professors from smaller institutions, public historians, digital historians, podcasters, K-12 teachers, park rangers, and a host of other non-academics who “do history.”

So why not think about an AHA president who lives and works in the trenches–a sort of “people’s president” who represents the vast majority of historians in America, both inside and outside the academy?  Why not have a president who is a professor at a liberal arts college who spends most of her or his time in the classroom, does her or his job well, and has few aspirations of working at a research university? Why not a public historian or a director of a historical society or history museum?  Why not a high school teacher?  It would be fun to imagine what kind of AHA presidential address these historians might deliver or what kind of initiatives they might promote.

Correspondents Wanted: 2020 AHA Meeting in New York City

/ johnfea

AHA 2020 Cover

Is anyone interested in a writing a post or two (or three or four or five…) from the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (and/or related meetings) in New York from January 3-6, 2020?

Once again The Way of Improvement Leads Home is looking for writers/correspondents to report from the conference.

What am I hoping for out of these posts/reports? Frankly, anything. Let the spirit move you. I would love to get general observations, reports on sessions you attend, job market updates, or any other kind of stuff you might have the time or inclination to write about.

Feel free to be as creative and journalistic as you want. My only requirement is that you write material while the conference is in session. I will try to get stuff posted here in real time (or thereabouts) during the conference.

Though we can’t pay you for writing, we can introduce you, your writing, and your online presence to a several thousand readers a day. Our posts on the AHA are regularly picked up at other sites and blogs as well.

If you are interested, shoot me an e-mail at jfea(at)messiah(dot)edu and we can get the ball rolling. In the meantime, check out our posts from other conferences to get an idea of what some of our previous correspondents have done:

Megan Jones at AHA 2019

Brantley Gasaway at AHA 2018

Matt Lakemacher at AHA 2019

Zach Cote at AHA 2018

Mike Davis at AHA 2018

William Cossen from AHA 2017

Michael Bowen from AHA 2017

The American Historical Association Announces 2019 Prize Winners

/ johnfea

AHAlogo

Here are a few of the winners:

The Albert J. Beveridge Award on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada, from 1492 to the present

Nan Enstad (Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison) for Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2018)

The Raymond J. Cunningham Prize for the best article published in a history department journal written by an undergraduate student

Lena Giger (Stanford Univ., BA 2019) for “The Right to Participate and the Right to Compete: Stanford Women’s Athletics, 1956–1995,” Herodotus (Spring 2019); faculty advisor: Estelle Freedman (Stanford Univ.)

The John H. Dunning Prize for the most outstanding book in US history 

Christina Snyder (Penn State Univ.) for Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017)

The William and Edwyna Gilbert Award for the best article in a journal, magazine, or other serial on teaching history

Sam Wineburg (Stanford Univ.), Mark Smith (Stanford History Education Group), and Joel Breakstone (Stanford Univ.), for “What Is Learned in College History Classes?” Journal of American History 104 (March 2018)

The Littleton-Griswold Prize in US law and society, broadly defined

Martha S. Jones (Johns Hopkins Univ.) for Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018)

The Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History to a freely available new media project

Robert K. Nelson, Justin Madron, Nathaniel Ayers, and Edward Ayers (Digital Scholarship Lab, Univ. of Richmond) for American Panorama: An Atlas of United States History

The Herbert Feis Award for distinguished contributions to public history

Sonia Hernandez (Texas A&M Univ.), Trinidad Gonzales (South Texas Coll.), John Morán González (Univ. of Texas at Austin), Benjamin Johnson (Loyola Univ. of Chicago), and Monica Muñoz Martinez (Brown Univ.) for the Refusing to Forget project.

All the winners are listed here.

Enrollment in History Courses is Holding Steady

/ johnfea

College-classroom

Here is the latest from the American Historical Association:

After years of declines, undergraduate enrollments in history courses held steady in the last academic year. Last summer, the AHA conducted its third annual survey of history departments and joint academic units, and received 120 complete responses for the past four academic years, the most recent of which was 2017–18. The responses suggest that the overall number of undergraduate students enrolled in history courses changed little from 2016–17. Enrollments slipped down less than 0.5 percent at US institutions. When Canadian institutions are included in the total, enrollments were almost identical (up less than 0.01 percent).

Read the rest of Julia Brookins‘s piece at Perspectives on History here.

It is Time for a President of the AHA Who Does Not Work at a Research University (#aha19)

/ johnfea

AHAlogo

NOTE:  This is a revised version of a post I wrote in January 2013.

What do all of these former American Historical Association presidents have in common?

2018: Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University

2017: Tyler Stovall, University of California-Santa Cruz

2016: Patrick Manning, University of Pittsburgh

2015: Vicki Ruiz, University of California-Irvine

2014: Jan Goldstein, University of Chicago

2013: Kenneth Pomeranz, University of Chicago

2012: William Cronon, University of Wisconsin

2011: Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

2010: Barbara Metcalf, University of Michigan

2009: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard University

2008: Gabrielle Spiegel, Johns Hopkins University

2007: Barbara Weinstein, University of Maryland

2006: Linda Kerber, University of Iowa

2005: James Sheehan–Stanford University

2004: Jonathan Spence, Yale University

2003: James McPherson, Princeton University

2002: Lynn Hunt, UCLA

2001: William Roger Louis, University of Texas at Austin

2000: Eric Foner, Columbia University

1999: Robert Darnton, Princeton University

1998: Joseph C. Miller, University of Virginia

1997: Joyce Appleby. UCLA

Apart from the fact that they are outstanding and groundbreaking scholars, they were all teaching at research universities while they served as president of the American Historical Association.  In fact, the last president of the AHA who did not teach at a research university was Nellie Nielson. She was president in 1943.  Nielson, who also happened to be the first female president of the AHA, spent most of her career at Mt. Holyoke College, a liberal arts college for women in South Hadley, MA.

I can understand why so many AHA presidents come from research universities.  They have time to write, produce, and thus make a name for themselves in the profession.  But I wonder if it is time to buck this trend.

Back in 2012,  William Cronon urged the profession to reconnect with the public through teaching, the Internet, and other digital efforts.  I know that Cronon’s interests reflect the interests of the AHA staff.  They are building a larger tent that covers not just academics who write award-winning books, but professors from smaller institutions, public historians, digital historians, podcasters, K-12 teachers, park rangers, and a host of other non-academics who “do history.”

So why not think about an AHA president who lives and works in the trenches–a sort of “people’s president” who represents the vast majority of historians in America, both inside and outside the academy?  Why not have a president who is a professor at a liberal arts college who spends most of her or his time in the classroom, does her or his job well, and has few aspirations of working at a research university? Why not a public historian or a director of a historical society or history museum?  Why not a high school teacher?  It would be fun to imagine what kind of AHA presidential address these historians might deliver or what kind of initiatives they might promote.

What Happened to the History Major?

/ johnfea / 1 Comment

9288b-historymajorAccording to a recent report from the American Historical Association, the undergraduate history major is in steep decline.  In the last six years, the number of history majors in American colleges and universities has dropped by about 33%, more than any other discipline.   And this is in a period when university enrollments have grown.  Here is a taste of the report:

Optimists may look at the last year’s line in these charts and note that the rate of decline appears to have slowed. It is reasonable to hope that the trends of the last decade will eventually bottom out, perhaps even in the next year or two. At this point, though, it would take several unprecedented years of growth in history majors to return to mid-2000s numbers; departments should not expect a rapid rebound. While there are anecdotal accounts of students seeking out history in the current political climate, leading indicators of student interest are at best mixed; most notably, the AHA’s survey of course enrollments in a number of departments for the 2016–17 academic year found continued declines in credit hours. (Editor’s note: results of the AHA enrollments survey for 2017–18 will be published in the January issue of Perspectives.)

Those enrollment numbers suggest one possible long-term trend: that history departments will become more oriented toward introductory-level courses. Although I am not aware of good data on credit hours for the critical period 2010–12, it seems that the declines in enrollments since then may have been gentler than the drops in majors. Students still take history courses—but more often, apparently, as electives, as requirements for other majors, or as general education requirements. If major numbers do not recover, each of these areas will become more important. One common plan, for joint or hybrid majors, is peripherally tracked in the IPEDS data through reporting of second majors. These numbers capture students who major in fields like “Political science and history” where any other field might occupy the first position. They do not seem to offer great consolation; history’s share of second majors mirrors its overall trend in the last decade.

Ultimately, whether through majors or course enrollments, the long-term state of the discipline will rest on how it adapts to a cohort of students—and their parents—who are much less receptive to arguments for the liberal arts than previous generations have been. Many departments and organizations have worked out useful ways to articulate the purpose of the major. These are undoubtedly helping attract and retain students today. (The institutions that made up AHA’s Tuning project, an initiative to this end, are among those on the front lines; the first set of Tuning departments reported marginally better enrollments from 2014 to 2017, though not so strongly that I am confident in their statistical significance.) As the 2008 crisis moves farther into the past, we should attempt to identify departments that have had the most notable successes.

Read the entire report here.

No commentary yet.  I need to think through this report a bit more.

Correspondents Wanted: 2019 AHA Meeting in Chicago

/ johnfea

AHA 2019

Is anyone interested in a writing a post or two (or three or four or five…) from the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago from January 3-6, 2019?

Once again The Way of Improvement Leads Home is looking for writers/correspondents to report from the conference.

What am I hoping for out of these posts/reports? Frankly, anything. Let the spirit move you. I would love to get general observations, reports on sessions you attend, job market updates, or any other kind of stuff you might have the time or inclination to write about.

Feel free to be as creative and journalistic as you want. My only requirement is that you write material while the conference is in session. I will try to get stuff posted here in real time (or thereabouts) during the conference.

Though we can’t pay you for writing, we can introduce you, your writing, and your online presence to a several thousand readers a day. Our posts on the AHA are regularly picked up at other sites and blogs as well.

If you are interested, shoot me an e-mail at jfea(at)messiah(dot)edu and we can get the ball rolling. In the meantime, check out our posts from other conferences to get an idea of what some of our previous correspondents have done:

2017 American Historical Association

2016 American Historical Association

The American Historical Association Will Launch *Perspectives Daily*

/ johnfea

AHAlogo

It will replace AHA Today.  Here is the press release:

In September 2006, AHA Today launched with a simple goal: to report on the latest happenings in the discipline of history that are too time-sensitive to wait a month or more for publication in Perspectives on History, the AHA’s print newsmagazine. 

Over the years, AHA staff members have worked hard to bring to our readers meaningful and diverse content on AHA Today—important announcements, Grants of the Week, Member Spotlight profiles, and posts about research, careers, graduate and undergraduate education, digital history, current events, and more. Today, we’re pleased to announce that AHA Today and Perspectives on History are merging. Perspectives will continue its highly regarded print and online editions, while Perspectives Daily will continue AHA Today’s tradition of featuring a wide variety of online-exclusive content.

These changes also bring a new publishing model to Perspectives—instead of dropping entire issues online at once, we will publish articles on a rolling basis. We hope that offering all print and online content regularly in one place will create a more enriching reader experience by eliminating the need to switch from one site to another. Expect a sleek new design, improved navigability, a biweekly newsletter (sign up here), and much more.

Around mid-June, links to all current content on AHA Today will be redirected to the new site. Thank you for your readership and see you soon at historians.org/perspectives!

Where Do Historians Work?

/ johnfea

Where historians work

The largest concentration of history Ph.Ds work along the northeast corridor between Boston and Washington D.C.

Check out Dylan Ruediger‘s blog post at AHA Today: “The Geography of History PhDs.”  A taste:

Knowing where historians live raises important questions about the relationship between mobility and careers, a perennial, controversial, and poorly understood aspect of PhD culture. PhD candidates have long been told that their ability to find employment rests on their willingness to move anywhere in pursuit of a tenure-track job. Without question, many history PhDs appear to follow this path. However, department-level data (available in the forthcoming version of Where Historians Work) shows that in many departments, graduates cluster in the cities and regions where they receive their degrees. These geographies no doubt reflect hierarchies of prestige within the discipline: earlier studies of historical careers done by the AHA have found that graduates from high-prestige programs scatter more widely than those from ones with regional reputations, a pattern that seems to still hold true. The geographical data also highlights the existence of regional employment patterns that complicate our sense of a single national academic job market. More importantly, they suggest that many PhDs have ties of family, friendship, and circumstance in the regions where they earn their degrees, and build careers that reflect those roots. Our data speak to outcomes rather than motivations, but knowing more about where historians live is a crucial step towards untangling the question of why.

Read the entire post here.

Learn more about “Where Historians Work” project.

“The Mechanics of Class Participation”

/ johnfea / 1 Comment

Classroom

Yesterday we did a post on Lendol Calder’s use of “Point Paragraphs” in the history classroom.  Calder’s piece was a part of larger Perspectives on History forum titled “How to Get Students to Think, Talk, Share, Collaborate, Learn and Come Back for More.” Here is a taste of Elizabeth Lehfeldt‘s Introduction to the forum:

We’ve all been there. Our syllabus specifies that a percentage of the course grade will be based on participation. We’ve presented riveting material or assigned a provocative reading. We show up for class, stand at the front of the room, and begin lobbing questions at the students. And the silence is deafening.

Our intentions are good, but something is missing in the execution. The four pieces offered here offer strategies and ideas for lifting our class discussions out of the doldrums and making them meaningful and efficacious for students.

Check out the forum here.