Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2007 OAH Convention: Day 2

by Rick Shenkman

Mr. Shenkman is the editor of HNN.

Day 2: Friday, March 30, 2007

It rained today. But thanks to the skywalks you didn't have to brave the elements unless you wanted to.

As the hours went by it seemed that more and more people showed up. The official tally of registered convention attendees by mid-afternoon came to about 1,900; it was a respectable total for an event held in the somewhat out-of-the-way Minneapolis. (OAH conventions in the big coastal cities usually draw about 2,500.)

Eight-month old Baby Jane, the child of historians Nicolas Rosenthal and Lauren Cole, presumably was not included in the official count. But she helped the OAH with its demographics, which are, shall we say, skewed toward the upper end of the age scale.

So did this fellow ... Samuel Redman. Wait for him to turn around in the video. You'll see what we mean. Samuel, who accelerated through college, is a first-year graduate student at Berkeley. He doesn't just look young. He is young. Twenty-one.

There were several signs today that we are not in fact on a holiday from history, to borrow George Will's potent description of the 1990s, though it had sorta seemed so yesterday. The antiwar historians manned a table.

And several panels dealt with controversial subjects in the news.

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Day 2: Friday, March 30, 2007