The Historical Society

From Thursday through Sunday, The Historical Society held its biennial national conference at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Launched to great fanfare in 1998, it was intended as an alternate to the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. While it could not hope to replace the traditional organizations in services (particularly, job placement), it appealed to a substantial number of historians who had been alienated from the mainstream organizations in the culture wars and by what some historians regarded as their neglect of traditional fields, such as constitutional, diplomatic, intellectual, military, and political history especially. In many respects, THS paralleled The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics' challenge to the MLA. Interestingly, one of its prime achievements has been in launching The Valve, which serves as a hub for literary blogging, much like Cliopatria does for historical blogging. THS also promised to appeal to graduate students by meeting at university sites, where housing and meals might be had less expensively. While there was some suspicion that it would be dominated by conservatives, the suspicion was largely unjustified because it welcomed historians of all political persuasions, so long as they were willing not to insist on a political agenda for the organization, itself.

I participated in launching THS and its first conference at Boston University in 1999. In subsequent years, some of us who were active in organizing it lost interest in it. Richard Jensen, who fathered H-Net, and I were among them. I've made my criticism of THS known at Cliopatria. The promise that it would be active from the ground up has largely failed, as its regional affiliates have mostly collapsed; and holding its 2004 conference at the Spruce Point Inn near Boothbay Harbor, Maine, betrayed the promise to graduate students and younger faculty members to hold its conferences at easily accessible and relatively inexpensive sites. Yet, by meeting at Chapel Hill in 2006, THS seems to have revisited that promise. It should also get credit for putting many of the papers for the conference on-line, there to be read by those who attend its gatherings and those who would not. Under the general theme,"Globalization, Empire, and Imperialism in Historical Perspective," there are a wide variety of topics offered. Go over and have a look. There's almost certainly something that will interest you. The advantages of posting papers on the net in advance of conferences are immediately obvious. It should help to free presenters from a text to engage an audience with a more vital summary of their argument and encourage more active discussion. In that respect, the AHA and the OAH should be following the example set by THS.