American Historical Association

Sandria B. Freitag, Executive Director, AHA,
with Robert Townsend and Vernan Horn

Not surprisingly, the institutional history of the American Historical Association over the last century mirrors to a large extent intellectual developments in the practice of the discipline. We could probably argue that, in the early decades, this reflection was largely unconscious; today we are quite deliberately reshaping our institutional activities to reflect new theoretical and methodological breakthroughs that alter the way historians work. In the contemporary global context, with strong transnational flows of cultural products (including historical interpretation), these changes by definition involve international activity — some systematic and institutional, some ad hoc and intellectual.

As an organization with its roots in the German model of historical scholarship, the American Historical Association has a long tradition of international involvement. The Association was founded out of the American Social Science Association in 1884, as a new group of “professional” historians trained in German universities rejected the “amateur” scholars in the ASSA. The Association’s principal purpose was to establish high professional standards for historical training and research. Nevertheless, as one might expect in a country without a graduate faculty in history, over half of those attending the Association’s formative meeting were not professionally trained.

However, over the next decade several historical faculties were established, all based on the German model of historical scholarship and training, and by 1900 American universities had granted over 200 Ph.D.’s. Significant recognition of the German intellectual model was signaled by the induction of the German historian Leopold von Ranke as an honorary member of the Association in 1886. Von Ranke represented, historiographically, the “professional” and “scientific” approach desired by American scholars, in which the historian conducted an “objective” analysis of primary source texts. This reliance on texts created by a ruling elite naturally led to the creation of a political narrative focused on publicly exercised power — a focus not inconsistent with the analytical emphases exercised by other disciplines of the time.

In 1890, the Association drew upon another international model, the British Historical Manuscripts Commission, to press for the collection and cataloging of governmental documents, an effort that would ultimately result in the National Archives. From its early years, then, the AHA exhibited a characteristic still dominant in its institutional character: it amalgamated methodological and theoretical approaches (deemed “rigorous” by the discipline) with issues related to the public-oriented side of practicing history, including document preservation and editing as well as public education regarding the past.

Leaders of the Association also followed an international model of publications, such as the German Historische Zeitschrift and English Historical Review, when they founded the American Historical Review as the premier journal of the profession in 1895 (the Review was only loosely affiliated with the Association for its first three years). From its inception, the Review reflected the wide diversity of interests of historians in America. Then and now, over half of the Review’s articles treat the history of areas outside the United States.

With the new century, the members and leadership of the Association slowly moved from a position of dependence upon European models to active involvement in shaping a new kind of American historiography that would take its place in the international arena. Always, this historiography moved beyond an American subject matter, though it continued to be preoccupied with the West. Beginning in 1903, the Association began to recognize original scholarly research on European history through its Herbert Baxter Adams Prize. Subsequently, the Association has added 10 other prizes to recognize significant research and publications by U.S. scholars on history outside the United States. These prizes include, for instance, the John K. Fairbank Prize for East Asian history, the Premio del Rey Prize in the field of early Spanish or Hispanic history, and the Wesley-Logan Prize for an outstanding book on the African diaspora.

Since the selection of von Ranke, the Association has recognized over 100 foreign scholars from Europe, Asia, and Africa with honorary foreign memberships. The Association’s membership long included a significant number of foreign scholars as members, usually numbering between one and five percent of the membership in non-war years. And the Association’s annual meeting program typically includes between 25 and 70 foreign scholars addressing a wide variety of historical topics.

The Association’s longest international involvement has been with the International Historical Congresses and the International Conference of Historical Sciences that grew out of them. After the First World War the International Historical Congress flourished, partly due to the support that it received from the League of Nations. At the initiative of representatives from the AHA to the 1923 Congress in Brussels, the International Conference for Historical Sciences (ICHS) was created as a permanent international historical organization.

At the same meeting, at the behest of J. Franklin Jameson — a founder and representative of the AHA — the Congress agreed to the publication of an annual bibliography of historical works. Two years later the AHA helped secure $35,000 in grants to help fund the bibliography and to establish an international journal, the Bulletin. During its early years, the treasury and legal headquarters for the ICHS was in Washington under the sponsorship of the AHA. From that time to the present, the AHA has served as the “national committee” of the United States, representing the ICHS and cooperating with it in the preparation; selection of topics, scholars, and papers; and execution of the Congresses.

In the late 1920s and 1930s the United States retreated into an isolationist phase; concomitantly the AHA’s interest in the International Congress also waned. Following the war the intellectual implications of isolationism became concrete in the practice of much history. While actively working to preserve various war documents, the members of the Association appear to have largely withdrawn into provincial concerns. Eventually, in an effort to invigorate the international involvement of U.S. historians, the Association established in 1952 a standing Committee on International Historical Activities to carry out the international relations of the Association.

In recent years, a significant part of the Association’s institutionally focused work has been devoted to encouraging the international exchange of scholars of history. Since the mid-1970s, working through a variety of funded grants, the Association has brought scholars from Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan to the United States for research and conferences. In 1983, the Association marked the 50th anniversary of U.S.-Soviet diplomatic relations by co-sponsoring a series of bilateral Soviet-American conferences. The AHA also co-sponsored the first Research Conference of Japanese and American Historians held in Tokyo and Kyoto that year.

In addition to participation in the International Conference for Historical Sciences, and a large volume of scholarly work published in the American Historical Review, the Association also maintained a continuous commitment to internationalized history through publication of the Guide to Historical Literature. The Guide, with editions published in 1931 and 1961, initially focused its annotated citations on historical scholarship about Europe. By contrast, the newest edition of the Guide, published early in 1995, expands the treatment of history to Asia, Latin and South America, and Africa, and has brought together hundreds of scholars from around the world to work collaboratively.

The fostering of formal, institutional opportunities for exchange and collaboration are important, of course. But they reveal only a small part of the profound shifts presently underway in the intellectual practice of history. Pre-eminently, these shifts reflect the permeable membranes between history and a number of other disciplines — social science quantitative methods first; then the deconstruction techniques of literary analysis; more recently, the political readings of power relationships represented by sociological and political theorists such as Foucault, Gramsci, and Said; and at the moment, the impact of new kinds of readings of visual evidence that bring together art history, anthropology, philosophy, and history. In all of these expansions of the methodological repertoire, historians have been especially interested in revealing the significance of those not previously regarded as noteworthy actors in the political narratives of an elite society. Historians now want to ask very different kinds of questions; they can construct narratives around different groups in society (e.g., women, laboring poor, et al.); they can move beyond printed texts to other kinds of evidence that enable them to uncover underlying assumptions and relationships that typify a society.

The interests of historians in change over time (which structures the narratives they construct), and their propensity to use case studies of particular places, are characteristics that build in certain understandings of analytical “rigor.” As a consequence, even when they draw heavily on these methodologies and pose organizing questions that were often pioneered in other disciplines, their new multidisciplinary work remains distinctively historical in nature. Perhaps it is this characteristic which permits the irony that these shifts toward multidisciplinary methodologies and theorizing have taken place at much the same time that the historical discipline itself has taken on increasing significance for the training of graduate students and for channeling job placements.

To argue that the fostering of scholarly collaboration by external agencies such as the ACLS and the SSRC should shift from interdisciplinary to discipline-focused approaches would be a mistake, however. From the perspective of the discipline of history, even when the fundamental questions being asked are historical in nature, the answers to those questions in all likelihood will be provided jointly by historians and other “specialists” in a variety of allied academic fields. I am thinking, for instance, of a recent conference focused on new historical questions that was organized by the University of Chicago and supported in part by the Social Science Research Council under its new “transnational” rubric. Despite the historical focus, no half-day session had papers and commentators from fewer than three different fields; these included history, anthropology, women’s studies, cultural studies (a category that could subsume a number of the others), literary analysis, and political science. It is this kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration that most needs the support of external agencies; university campuses and disciplinary associations cannot effectively foster this important source of intellectual innovation.

Many of the questions posed by that particular conference challenged tenets that had emerged from work fostered by the older model of area studies. These challenges came not so much from any discipline, however, as they did from an heir to area studies — postcolonial studies. This kind of challenge from within area studies has led to an exercise among South Asianists, for example, to re-examine many of the basic tenets defining area studies as a form of training and academic organization. (As a result of three years’ national discussion, South Asianists have now instituted a specific day each year on which to take up different issues over time; these issues range from new teaching methodologies to library collections, from research trajectories to language instruction.) It is interesting to me that among those most active in these national discussions have been historians; we seem to be ideally placed to value the contributions of an area-studies focus. These unique contributions include, especially, language training and the ability to work cross-disciplinarily to understand a region’s cultural modalities and how these change over time. Historians also seem particularly able to evaluate critically the links between this form of intellectual organization with the newer forms of theoretical advances (such as those emerging from women’s studies and postcolonial studies). What the South Asia discussions suggest, it would seem, is that rather than the disciplines supplanting an older model of area studies, we have a development in which both the disciplines and the area studies models have contributed to new intellectual directions that cross disciplinary boundaries.

Changes in the organization and assumptions underlying historical research practices affect other aspects of the discipline and the profession as well. We have been struck at the AHA by the interrelationship between the growing intellectual interest in new narratives with new subjects, and a commitment to teaching and student preparation (leading also to greater involvement with K-12 teachers). Similarly, expansion in the number of historians interested in non-Western areas of the world has been accompanied (though perhaps not caused) by a concomitant commitment to increasing diversity in the classroom and the academic work force. These changes have profoundly altered the responsibilities of the AHA itself: Its three divisions (responsible for research, teaching, and professional issues, respectively) and allied committee structure (especially its committees on women historians, minority historians, and international studies), work much harder to give expression to a diversified set of voices. At the same time, the AHA’s services to the field have been much elaborated to accommodate this expanded mandate. (The monthly Perspectives newsletter, for instance, has almost doubled in size in recent years, due in no small part to an energetic new interest in teaching.) Projects emerging from these groups have, with increasing frequency, had international implications in subject matter and forms of collaboration. A recent collection of essays guided by the Research Division, for instance, has been designed to aid teaching the results of recent research on global and world history; these essays have been published both as a collection in book form and as individual pamphlets available to K-12 teachers. Another example would be the cooperation extended by the Teaching Division and the AHA central office in recent months to Euro-Clio, an organization with member representatives from numerous European nations, interested in fostering international discussions on teaching issues.

The need for international intellectual exchange that arises from these changes in the practice of history has never been more pressing. It would be impossible under current circumstances, for instance, to work on the history of any part of the postcolonial world without working closely with scholars from that area. (This situation all too often characterized American historical scholarship of earlier decades.) Moreover, the increasingly explicit uses made of history as an ideological vehicle, in America as in many other parts of the world, underscores the political as well as intellectual implications of the way our constituencies practice history. The importance of fostering open and frequent scholarly communication across national boundaries grows with every international development.

To the extent that historians (both collectively and individually) have been involved in protecting, expanding, and making accessible archival and library collections, they have also been involved in work with important international implications. It is not only that documents relating to American history are made available for the world (though this is what people usually think of). It is also that, given the extraordinarily rich repositories in Title VI center campus libraries, as well as the Library of Congress, American research collections often serve scholars of other world regions even better than do their home institutions (e.g., scholars of African history, or even South Asia). Attracting scholars to America for these research purposes, in turn, helps to cement collegial relationships and facilitates cooperative international partnerships in scholarship. Here, too, the disciplines and area studies work to strengthen each other; they could not be effectively separated in terms of their impact.

A similar sort of relationship exists between the new intellectual reach of historians and the modes of communication they utilize. Pre-eminent in this respect is electronic communication. Already the more informal collegial connections possible with overseas scholars has begun to make itself felt; more formal connections will emerge from the planning of international conferences and collaborations currently taking place on the Internet. At present there are some 47 electronic listservs organized to fill the need for rapid communication and new collegial communities among historians (these range from H-Women to H-Asia to H-Labor). Indeed, an exchange in mid-October over H-Asia asked for feedback from historians regarding area studies; the consensus seemed to be that this training rubric is now moving beyond Orientalism and Cold War mentalities to foundations that will serve well graduate students in history.

As a professional association for such increasingly computer-literate constituencies (and one that is still woefully underequipped for this world), we are struggling to find appropriate strategies for bringing our services onto the new technological frontier. It is clear, moreover, that facilitating communication among member historians will not only serve better our constituency here in the United States, but will also help foster expanded international ties. The Australians always seem to be first in adopting technologies to mitigate distance from intellectual colleagues, but in the case of electronic communication, the Chinese may not be far behind!

As the discipline of history itself changes, then, the role of its umbrella professional association has been changing as well. The transnational nature of the dialogue in the field necessarily provides new challenges for the AHA in continuing to serve its constituencies. We hope to provide such services not only through the maintenance of formal overseas institutional ties, but also through the informal fostering of intellectual ties — expressed, especially, in particular research techniques and agendas that incorporate the interest in new subjects and new methodologies. In the course of the AHA’s efforts to facilitate intellectual and institutional collaboration, we aim to unite the discipline ever more closely with such interdisciplinary approaches as area studies and its successor approaches.