|
View the h-german Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in h-german's June 1998 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in h-german's June 1998 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the h-german home page.
Submitted by: Gerald Feldman
feldman@medea.wz-berlin.de
I am grateful to Jerry Z. Muller for providing appropriate detail on
the Program of the 1998 AHA meeting. That program was symptomatic
of more general problems. The steady deterioration in the
intellectual quality and significance of the AHA meetings over the
years moved me to associate myself with the Historical Society. Even
more disturbing is the kind of sleight-of-hand reflected in the way
in which the organizers make believe that diplomatic/foreign policy
subjects are on the agenda when the actual subject matter of the
sessions has little or nothing to do with international relations.
In fairness, intellectual history was treated more honestly in one of
the programs. It did not even appear in the index! Apparently, the
people who run the AHA seem intent on following the model of the MLA.
One need only compare the program of the forthcoming German
Historical Association meeting in Frankfurt with recent AHA programs
to realize how off the wall we have become.
I am not one of those who believes that people should leave the AHA
to join the new Society, and I continue to pay rather hefty dues to
receive a steady diet of junk from Perspectives and disappointment
from the AHR. The AHA is chartered by Congress and has
considerable resources now unfortunately in the hands of persons
who think that the organization is there to reflect the latest
developments in their political and personal life cycles. As
more people get weary of the unwholesome diet provided by the
AHA, and as young historians either fail to join or leave as soon
as they have a job, things may change. What the Historical Society
can offer is a venue where interested historians can meet to discuss
serious historical subjects in a serious manner and get some sense of
what an alternative to the AHA programs might be like. Competition
to the AHA might be helpful to the AHA itself and might also persuade
historians to do something about what should after all be their
organization. Until now, the leadership of the AHA has been quite
oblivious to the fact that many people simply fail to take it
seriously or treat it as a joke. This is not a healthy state of
affairs, however, and I think it is a great mistake for us to turn
all the significant problems over to Political Science and not to
promote a genuine historical and humanistic understanding of the real
world in which we live in collaboration with the social sciences.
Gerald D. Feldman, University of California at Berkeley
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
|