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SS'tHld NOI..L[l~I.l.sNI NVINOSHLIWS 8L61· llIOdtllI iVilNNV UOJJVJJOSSV lVJJ.1oJsJH UVJJ.1lJUlV For sale by the Superintendel1it of Documents U.S. Government Printing Office Washington, D.C. 20402 ii Contents Page Letters of Submittal and Transmittal ................. v Act of Incorporation ............................. vii Presidential Address ............................. 1 Background .................................... 21 Constitution and Bylaws .......................... 25 Officers, Council, Nominating Committee, Committee on Committees, and Board of Trustees for 1979 ........ 37 Officers' Reports Vice-Presidents: Professional Division 39 Research Division ........................... 45 Teaching Division ........................... 51 Executive Director . 61 Editor ....................................... 75 Controller .................................... 79 Membership Statistics ............................ 96 Minutes of the Council Meeting .................... 103 Minutes of the Ninety-third Business Meeting .......... 115 Committee Reports .............................. 121 Prizes and Awards ............................... 147 Report of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association . .. 149 Report of the Program Chairman ................... 155 Program of the Ninety-third Annual Meeting .......... 163 iii Letters of Submittal and Transmittal June 15,1979 To the Congress of the United States: In accordance with the act of incorporation of the American Historical Association, approved January4, 1889, I have the honor of submitting to Congress the Annual Report of the Association for the year 1978. Respectfully, S. Dillon Ripley, Secretary SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION WASHINGTON, D.C. June 15, 1979 To the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution: As provided by law, I submit to you herewith the report of the American Historical Association, comprising the proceedings of the Association and the report of its Pacific Coast Branch for 1978. This volume constitutes the Association's report on the condition of historical study in the United States. Mack Thompson, Executive Director AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION WASHINGTON, D.C. v Act of Incorporation Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Andrew D. White, of Ithaca, in the State of New York; George Bancroft, of Washington, in the District of Columbia; Justin Winsor, of Cam bridge, in the State of Massachusetts; William F. Poole, of Chi cago, in the State of Illinois; Herbert B. Adams, of Baltimore, in the State of Maryland; Clarence W. Bowen, of Brooklyn, in the State of New York, their associates and successors, are hereby created, in the District of Columbia, a body corporate and politic by the name of the American Historical Association, for the pro motion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical manuscripts, and for kindred purposes in the interest of American history, and of history in America. Said Association is authorized to hold real and personal estate in the District of Columbia as far as may be necessary to its lawful ends, to adopt a constitution, and make bylaws not inconsistent with law. Said Association shall have its principal office at Washington, in the District of Columbia, and may hold its annual meetings in such places as the said incorporators shall determine. Said Association shall report annually to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institu tion, concerning its proceedings and the condition of historical study in America. Said Secretary shall communicate to Congress the whole of such report, or such portions thereof as he shall see fit. The Regents of the Smithsonian Institution are authorized to permit said Association to deposit its collections, manuscripts, books, pamphlets, and other material for history in the Smith sonian Institution or in the National Museum, at their discretion, upon such conditions and under such rules as they shall prescribe. The real property situated in Square 817, in the city of Wash ington, District of Columbia, described as lot 23, owned, occupied, and used by the American Historical Association, is exempt from vii all taxation so long as the same is so owned and occupied, and not used for commercial purposes, subject to the provisions of sections 2, 3, and 5 of the Act entitled, "An Act to define the real property exempt from taxation in the District of Columbia," approved December 24, 1942. [Approved, January 4, 1889, and amended July 3, 1957.] viii PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History* WILLIAM J. BOUWSMA I SHOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS A REMARKABLE HISTORIOGRAPIllCAL EVENT-an event so recent that it may have escaped general notice, yet of considerable importance both for historians and for the larger culture of which we are a part. This event is the collapse of the traditional dramatic organization of Western history. We have long depended upon it, as inhabitants of the modem world, to put the present into some distant temporal perspective and, as professional historians pursuing our particular investigations, to provide us with some sense of how the various fields of history are related to each other as parts of a larger whole. Thus, the sub ject seems appropriate for a general session of our annual meeting. The subject is also appropriate for me, as a historian of the Renaissance, because of the pivotal position of the Renaissance in the traditional pattern. Indeed, the historian of the Renaissance has long been the principal guardian of that pattern. But historians of the Renaissance have lately been unable-or unwilling-to fulfill this old responsibility. Hence, this essay is also a kind of oblique professional autobiography, though I point this out only for the sake of candor, not as a further inducement to your attention. Nothing seemed less likely than this development when I entered the profession some thirty years ago or, indeed, before the last two decades. Earlier in this century, the Burckhardtian vision of the importance of the Renaissance for the formation of the modem *Reprinted by permission American Historical Review 1979. All rights reserved. 1 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION world had been under attack in the "revolt of the medievalist"; and in 1940 Wallace K. Ferguson had described the Renaissance as "the most intractable problem child of historiography." 1 But Ferguson had himself never been without hope for straightening out his problem child; and less than a decade later, after studying the history of the case from many directions, he predicted for it a tranquil and prosperous maturity. The time was ripe, he declared, for "a new and more comprehensive synthesis." 2 The revolt of the medievalists had apparently been beaten back; indeed, by teaching us greater care in distinguishing the new from the old, they seemed only to have strengthened our sense of the originality and mod ernity of the Renaissance. In the years after the war a group of unusually distinguished scholars brought new excitement to Renaissance studies; the concreteness and depth of their learning seemed to confirm Ferguson's expectations.s During the fifties, therefore, it was common for Renaissance spe cialists from various disciplines to celebrate, by reading papers to each other, their triumph over the medievalists and the world historical significance of the Renaissance. Our agreement was re markable. The editor of one volume of such papers noted with satisfaction "the virtual disappearance of the disposition to deny that there was a Renaissance." And he ventured to predict, ob viously recalling controversies now happily over, "that future soldier-scholars will beat their swords into ploughshares and that what has long been the Renaissance battleground will be trans formed into a plain of peace and plenty." On the other hand, he also hinted that the occasion evoking these papers was a bit dull. 1 Ferguson, The Renaissance (New York, 1940),2. • Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston, 1948), 389. This presidential address was delivered at the annual meeting of the Ameri can Historical Association in San Francisco, December 28, 1978. I should like to acknowledge at 'the outset the helpful criticism this paper received from Thomas A. Brady, Ir. of the University of Oregon and from my Berkeley colleagues Gene Brucker and Randolph Starn. • For some of the works tha:t particularly influenced me at this time, in addition to those of Ferguson, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Classics and Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1955); Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1955); Eugenio Garin, L'umanesimo italiano (Bari, 19s.B); and the various essays of Erwin Panofsky, especially "Renaissance and Renascences," Kenyon Review, 6 (1944),201-36. 2 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS "The atmosphere of charitable catholicity was so all pervading during the symposium," he remarked, "that even the moderators' valiant efforts to provoke controversy were largely futile." 4 That the Renaissance was the critical episode in a dramatic process that would culminate in ourselves had become an orthodoxy that few cared-or dared-to question. The notion of an abiding consensus among historians of any complex subject may now seem rather surprising, and this agree able situation was probably in part a reflection of the general con sensus of the Eisenhower years, when we were

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