2018 OAH Annual Meeting

Imagining a New Kind of Academic Annual Meeting: With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the OAH seeks to amplify the Annual Meeting to reach the public, teachers, students, and scholars interested in American history. The OAH Amplified Initiative will broaden our audience and continue our conversation beyond the walls of the conference meeting. The OAH and Mellon want the work presented at the Annual Meeting to become available to a broader audience, allowing instructors to engage with new ideas in their classrooms and researchers to access and cite the scholarship presented. The foundation for doing this will be the digital audio recordings of the sessions at the 2018 Annual Meeting. (Should any participant opt out of the audio recording, the entire session will be removed from the recording schedule.) Additionally, a video studio will be set up at the conference where select attendees will be interviewed.

The audio and video recordings captured at the 2018 Annual Meeting will be tagged so that they can be searched and combined in new ways—by topic, period, or type of presentation. These files will be made available to select groups who will curate, introduce, and interpret programs for particular audiences. Members will be able to listen to the audio files and participants will be able to download their own sessions.

The OAH is excited to provide this opportunity to amplify your work both inside the historical community and beyond it. We look forward to building community and sharing ideas between our members and those studying, teaching, and interpreting U.S. history.

Call for Proposals

The Forms of History

The OAH annual meeting of 2018 will foster conversation about the forms in which we represent the American past.

Encouraging proposals from all periods and subjects of American history, the program committee also encourages colleagues to address explicitly the form in which they conceive and present their work. Form embraces the medium, the narrative or analytical strategy, evidence, and intended audience for an interpretation. Bringing those decisions to the surface can generate productive questions and conversation.

Form works quite differently in different genres of history. The creation of new knowledge in monographs, journal articles, and conference papers, for example, inspires, enables, and limits other forms in ways it would be useful to consider.

Teaching at all levels is the most powerful and commonly practiced form of historical discussion. Paying closer attention to our means of instruction can help make teaching more engaging and enlightening.

Americans engage with the nation's past at historic sites, in novels and stories, in movies, on television, and in theater. They participate in genealogy and in online communities. Millions visit national parks and millions play electronic games in which history provides the setting and the drama.

History is one of the most popular genres of popular non-fiction, with biographies, overviews of major events, and analyses of the historical origins of current-day problems often on the bestseller lists.

History operates throughout the digital world, from transformed archives to innovative visualizations. Historians experiment to find digital forms that advance our understanding of the past and that share that understanding with broader audiences.

Interpretations of the history of politics, military events, and foreign relations shape policy, op-eds, political campaigns, trade policy, law, military strategy, and conflict resolution.

Whatever the context and purpose, form shapes the stories we tell and the way we understand the past. Addressing those forms more thoughtfully can improve all that historians do.

The meeting will also encourage experimentation with the form of the presentation of the meeting itself.

For decades, historians have complained about the structure of our sessions, in which we read papers to one another. This meeting will foster alternatives that feature the many and diverse forms of history, encouraging, for example, the distribution of materials beforehand electronically, the presentation of video or other performance, engagement with the audience from the outset, the creative use of social media, and so on. Please experiment.

Everyone is welcome.