From the Editor From the President UNESCO and Scholarly Communication Patrick Manning From the Executive Director Graduate Education Reconsidered James Grossman and Emily Swafford News Preserving Disability Heritage: Gallaudet Inaugurates New Center for Deaf Documentary Studies Kritika Agarwal Beyond “Roads Scholars”: Perspectives from the AHA Committee on Non-Tenure- Track Faculty Lynn Y. Weiner and Philip Suchma ORCID Blooms: How Unique Identification Numbers Can Aid Research and Discovery Seth Denbo Advocacy From the National Coalition for History: Fighting to Save an Endangered Revolutionary War Battlefield Lee White Columns From the National History Center: Meeting the Challenges of Influencing Policy Amanda Moniz History and Policy for Students and Educators Amanda Moniz Historians on the Hill Justene G. Hill Viewpoints What Do We Mean by “Value”? It’s Time to Challenge the Carnegie Classifications Peter N. Stearns FEATURES Beyond Big Brother: Turning ID Cards into Weapons of Citizenship Jose Ragas

Lab Partners: Experimenting with Active Learning Gabriel Pizzorno and Heidi Tworek Annual Meeting Meeting Tweeting: Insights on Making Connections from #AHA16 Stephanie Kingsley AHA Activities “The Future of the African American Past”: A Landmark Conference to Mark the Opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Dana Schaffer In the April Issue of the American Historical Review Alex Lichtenstein 2016 AHA Nominations Compiled by Liz Townsend In Memoriam Career Paths Casting a Wider Net: History PhDs, Change Your Perspective! Ramona Houston AHA Career Center On the Cover

ur cover story, Jose O Ragas’s “Beyond Big Brother,” brings to light emerging research on the use of identity documents to assert belonging. Although ID cards originated in the sciences of surveillance in the 19th century, their proliferation led to a variety of meanings for individuals. Ragas takes conventional analyses of biometric technologies and stands them on their ear. Image: Vhils (Alexandre Farto), Dissection/Via Pedro Ribeiro Simões/Flickr/CC BY 2.0 Newsmagazine of the

400 A Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003-3889 202.544.2422 • Fax 202.544.8307 E-mail: [email protected] Web page: www.historians.org/perspectives

Perspectives on History Editor Allison Miller Associate Editor, Web Content and Social Media Stephanie Kingsley Associate Editor, Publications Kritika Agarwal Contributing Editor Sarah Fenton Editorial Assistant Sadie Bergen Coordinator, Professional Data and Job Center Liz Townsend Marketing and Public Relations Manager Jane Green American Historical Association Executive Director James R. Grossman Deputy Director Dana Schaffer Director of Scholarly Communication and Digital Initiatives Seth Denbo Director, Meetings Sharon K. Tune Coordinator, Committees and Meetings Debbie Ann Doyle Meetings and Office Assistant Matthew Keough Membership Manager Pamela Scott-Pinkney Assistant Membership Manager Michelle Hewitt Manager of Academic Affairs Emily Swafford Special Projects Coordinator Julia Brookins Program Coordinator Amanda Moniz Program Assistant Elizabeth Elliott Controller Randy Norell Staff Accountant Betsy Orgodol Perspectives on History (ISSN 1940-8048) is published nine times a year, monthly September through May, by the American Historical Association, 400 A St., SE, Washington, DC 20003- 3889. (202) 544-2422. Fax (202) 544-8307. World Wide Web: www.historians.org/perspectives E-mail: [email protected] (editorial issues) or [email protected] (membership and subscription issues). Perspectives on History is distributed to members of the Association. Individual membership subscriptions include an amount of $7.04 to cover the cost of Perspectives on History. Institutional subscriptions are also available. For details, contact the membership department of the AHA. Single copies of Perspectives on History—if available—can be obtained for $8 each. Material from Perspectives on History may be published in Perspectives Online (ISSN: 1556-8563), published by the American Historical Association at www.historians.org/perspectives For information about institutional subscriptions, see www.historians.org/members/subscriptions.htm Articles, letters to the editor, and other items intended for publication should preferably be submitted online at www.historians.org/perspectives/upload They may also be sent as attachments to e-mail messages addressed to [email protected], or by regular mail (in which case, the hard copy text should be double-spaced). Manuscripts accepted for publication will be edited to conform to Perspectives on History style, space limitations, and other requirements. Prospective authors should consult the guidelines available at www.historians.org/perspectives/submissions.htm Accuracy in editorial material is the responsibility of the author(s) and contributor(s). Perspectives on History and the American Historical Association disclaim responsibility for statements made by contributors. Individual articles in Perspectives on History for which the American Historical Association holds the copyright may be reproduced for noncommercial use under Creative Commons license CC-B​ Y-N​ C-N​ D 4.0. Attribution must include author name, article title, Perspectives on History, issue date, and a link to the online version of the article (which can be found at www.historians.org/perspectives more on the Creative Commons license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-​ nc-n​ d/4.0. This license does not apply to text or images reproduced here for which the AHA does not hold the copyright. Periodicals class postage paid at Washington, DC, and at additional mailing offices. ©2016 American Historical Association. Postmaster: Send change of address to Perspectives on History, Membership Department, AHA, 400 A St., SE, Washington, DC 20003- 3889. Publisher’s Statement The American Historical Association is a nonprofit membership corporation founded in 1884 for the promotion of historical research, study, and education. The Association reserves the right to reject editorial material sent in for publication that is not consonant with the goals and purposes of the organization. The Association also assumes the right to judge the acceptability of all advertising copy and illustrations in advertisements published in Perspectives on History. Advertisers and advertising agencies assume all liability for advertising content and representation and will also be responsible for all claims against said publisher. FROM THE EDITOR Townhouse Notes n “Time, Work- I Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967), E. P. Thompson argued that capital came to dictate what work got done when and at what rate, helping to wrest control of labor from workers. The bourgeoisie destroyed traditions that affected production, most famously the craft laborers’ custom of working less or not at all on “Saint Monday.” But some populations, Thompson thought, persisted in “work patterns” consisting of “alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness,” especially the self-employed—“and perhaps also . . . students.” Faculty work rhythms mirror students’ in some ways, most obviously in the fall-to-spring academic calendar, which features times of breakneck intensity followed by extended fallow periods. Nobody gets summers off— students and faculty alike must work—but the anticipation of “break” is palpable at this time of year. Professors’ work- discipline, however, seems to include an emotional component: guilt about not producing enough. Social media posts about productivity abound, and not only during business hours. Whatever the performative aspect of always being busy, academics care deeply about the quality and quantity of their output, which is often complicated by the demands of personal life. This is true of teaching, research, and service. Those who have academic jobs often cite “setting my own hours” as a perk. But I’m struck by the negative feelings that can accompany “not getting anything done today.” Academics, as a class, work for low pay and long hours, under the expectation that their writing, teaching, and service be of the highest caliber— tenure may be denied, contracts may not be renewed. Saint Monday is little observed among faculty today (posts about drinking wine while grading notwithstanding). Personally, I can’t not care about the quality of what I do; I love doing it. But I’ve found that one benefit of nonacademic labor is that I’m not emotionally invested in filling every spare hour with work. I cram all the work I can into a certain amount of time rather than all the time I have into a certain amount of work. That doesn’t appeal to everyone, and indeed, middle-class professions often require serious time commitments. But as many of us look toward the break that’s not really a break, perhaps we can think about separating time, work- discipline, and self- judgment. Marxism off.

—Allison Miller, editor Correction he article “Scholars T on the Edge: The LGBTQ Historians Task Force Report and the AHA” (Perspectives on History, February 2016) implied that La Shonda Mims did doctoral work at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In fact, she earned her master’s degree there. Perspectives regrets the error. FROM THE PRESIDENT UNESCO and Scholarly Communication Patrick Manning he United Nations, now 70 T years old, stands as a striking element of the postwar world. Though always problematic, it has survived and played a key role in global affairs, in contrast to the collapse of its predecessor, the League of Nations, after about 20 years. Perhaps the biggest achievement of the UN and its constituent organizations has been maintaining wide membership. Nearly all of the world’s nations hold seats in the General Assembly and in such other UN organizations as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). UNESCO is of particular interest to historians because of its role in coordinating global academic affairs. UNESCO, formed in 1946 and formally chartered in 1951, is governed by its constitution and the General Conference of its national members. While best known for its recognition of World Heritage Sites (now numbering 1,031), UNESCO has many activities in education, science, and culture. The UNESCO Secretariat comprises a complex, shifting organizational structure centered in Paris but with field offices worldwide. In overseeing scientific collaboration, UNESCO sustains three great federations of academic organizations: in natural sciences, the International Council for Science (ICSU, after its former name, the International Council of Scientific Unions, 1931); in social sciences, the International Social Science Council (ISSC, 1952); and in the humanities, the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (ICPHS, 1949). ICPHS includes the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS) and also the International Union of Academies. Our own AHA has two sorts of representation in UNESCO, as a national affiliate within ICHS and as a member of the American Council of Learned Societies, which in turn is a national affiliate of ICPHS. These bodies are all independent, but UNESCO’s coordination of them can be of great ​- significance. UNESCO’s biggest early achievements were in the natural sciences. In 1957– 58, the ​ICSU-sponsored International Geophysical Year confirmed the theory of plate tectonics and continental drift, while the International Biological Program (active from 1964 to 1974) expanded collaborative research on environmental issues. UNESCO’s support of ICSU was critical to these achievements—both of them powerful statements of the benefits of international academic collaboration. UNESCO has facilitated scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, too. But the academic federations for the humanities and social sciences, because they have not been as strong as the ICSU in the natural sciences, have limited themselves to convening international disciplinary conferences. As a result, the UNESCO Secretariat has itself carried major programs in the humanities and social sciences, rather than sponsoring initiatives of the ISSC or the ICPHS. For example, beginning in the 1950s, the secretariat launched a substantial effort in the study of world history, which lasted until the mid- 1970s.1 Later on, it was the UNESCO Secretariat, not the academic organizations, that published the General History of Africa, a widely successful eight- volume series, followed by series on Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions. The problem was that while the UNESCO Secretariat made important contributions to publication on the history and culture of areas outside Europe and North America, and while major scholars were leaders in preparing these volumes, the disciplinary organizations did not take the opportunity to become involved in new scholarship about the world outside the North Atlantic. The ICHS played a small role in the UNESCO publications and continued working within a Eurocentric framework. Meanwhile, academic issues could never be separated from political differences within UNESCO. More than for the UN as a whole, nations have joined and left UNESCO for political reasons. Underlying these resignations and reentries was the changing shape of world politics. As decolonization advanced, UNESCO grew from its initial 50 members to nearly 150 in 1975, which was at roughly the same rate as the UN General Assembly. From 1975 to 1987, Senegal’s Amadou- Mahtar M’Bow served as director-general of UNESCO. In this era, the secretariat paid increasing attention to society and culture in the third world; meanwhile, UNESCO’s coordination of academic bodies prioritized the sciences, much as before. Responding to one side of this pattern, the Reagan administration and the Thatcher government withdrew from UNESCO in 1984 and 1985, respectively, arguing that the organization had become “politicized” or anti-Western. With that, the United States and the United Kingdom also withdrew their financial support, which had comprised 30 percent of the total contributions to UNESCO. The United States rejoined UNESCO only in 2003. For those 20 years, UNESCO cut its staff by 50 percent and reduced all of its activities, notably in international academic collaboration.2 Academic issues could never be separated from political differences. More than for the UN as a whole, nations have joined and left UNESCO for political reasons.

Then the United States ceased participating again in 2011. Without formally quitting, the Obama administration ceased paying US dues because Palestine was admitted as a UNESCO member; Congress had banned US funding of UN bodies that recognize Palestine. The United States’ dues constituted 22 percent of UNESCO’s budget. This created a complex situation as to whether the United States could still participate without paying. To what degree and in what way should political considerations be brought into nongovernmental organizations, especially those that are institutions for building knowledge? One might argue that political disputes should play no role in academic life. But there are limits to this principle: during two periods in the 20th century—from 1914 to 1919 and from 1939 to 1945—virtually no worldwide academic congresses were held because of full-scale war. An interesting intermediate case in the aftermath of World War I established a principle that academic organizations should be separate from political disputes. In 1919 the International Research Council was created, replacing the defunct International Association of Academies (founded in 1899). But the former Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria) would not be admitted, due especially to the insistence of France. As a result, international scientific discourse excluded German academia, then arguably the world’s strongest university system. The ban grew increasingly inappropriate but was difficult to resolve. Finally, in 1931 the International Research Council chose to dissolve itself, then reconstituted itself as the ICSU, which was open to organizations of all nations. The new group enunciated the principle that scientific unions should be self- governing and that the ICSU should have no diplomatic ties.3 In the years since, the ICSU has built its strength in supporting the natural sciences worldwide. The principles resulting from its experience, as I understand them, are that politics cannot be eliminated from the production of knowledge, but the exchange of ideas and the advancement of knowledge work better when all parties are included in academic meetings, whatever the nature of government in individual nations. Again, as in the 1920s, we find the nation with the world’s strongest academic system largely absent from the global academic federation. While Germany was kept out in the 1920s as punishment for war guilt, the United States chose to suspend payment of dues as a response to the admission of Palestine in 2011. In each case politics trumped academic communication. It is a complex situation: the US government does not pay its dues and has withdrawn from activity in the General Conference of all member states, but US-based academic and other organizations are able to continue in their UNESCO activities. The AHA partici​pated in the ICHS congress in Jinan, China, in August 2015, and an American representative was elected to the ICHS board, replacing another American whose term had ended. By paying its own membership dues and participating in the ICHS, the AHA supports the international academic community. Yet without the US government paying dues to UNESCO, the overall structure undergirding ICHS is substantially weakened. Our group of historians can do little to influence such political realities. What we can do, however, is build up our awareness of the dangers of academic isolationism and make efforts within our own profession to maintain and build academic exchanges with historians around the world. Our understanding of the past will advance as a result. For the future, one can imagine that ICHS will become more representative of historical studies worldwide, and that the organization of historical scholars will intersect more closely with the UNESCO Secretariat and its interventions in history and memory. The AHA, the single largest national association of historians, could play an important facilitative role in bringing history to the forefront in UNESCO. Patrick Manning is president of the American Historical Association. Notes 1. UNESCO, History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Developments, 6 vols. (New York, 1963– 75). 2. The United Kingdom rejoined UNESCO in 1997. The other departures from UNESCO were Portugal, from 1972 to 1974; South Africa, from 1956 to 1994; and Singapore, from 1985 to 2007. 3. Frank Greenaway, Science International: A History of the International Council of Scientific Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 30–34. The parallel International Association of Academies, led by Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, remained under the radar and appears not to have experienced such a conflict.

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Graduate Education Reconsidered James Grossman and Emily Swafford ver the past four years, the AHA O has devoted substantial energy to reconsidering the purpose and content of history education in colleges and universities, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. More than 200 historians have participated in a set of separate initiatives that share a common approach: taking end points as starting points. If one way of thinking about historical scholarship is to ask, “How did we get here?” (with “here” referring to any point in time and place), then a correlate for history education works backward from a desired outcome. Tuning, for instance, is an AHA project in which historians convene and collaborate to frame what history majors at different types of universities should know, understand, and be able to do upon graduation. While this might seem self-evident as an approach, it requires that we focus less on teaching than on learning: we begin not with what we want to teach but rather with what we want our students to learn. A radical notion indeed. An outcomes-based approach also requires articulating purposes and goals. In the case of undergraduate education, this has meant replacing an emphasis on preparing our majors for graduate study in history with a focus on the role of the history major in liberal education, and replacing the broad rubric of “critical thinking” with the more precise “historical thinking” as our contribution to that education. Those two shifts opened a space for departments to reconsider what they want their students to learn and how both faculty and students can articulate those outcomes. Few of us have thought about graduate education in this way, especially at the PhD level. We take for granted the desired outcome: employment as a faculty member in higher education. And we focus on a limited set of duties related to that professional path, largely scholarly publication along with classroom teaching at the level of the single course. This is hardly surprising: we want our students to be successful, and PhD programs have traditionally defined success as attaining a tenure-track appointment, preferably at a four-year institution of higher education, and if possible in the kind of research environment that enables its faculty to play an active role in the next generation’s production of new knowledge. This definition of success has shaped the graduate curriculum. And if the large majority of our students attained such positions, that curriculum would be appropriate. Anecdotally, it seems that a great proportion of history PhD students anticipate that their degree will be the gateway to lifetime faculty tenure. (The AHA will soon gather survey data to test this assumption.) But what happens if that gate opens only wide enough to accommodate half of all history PhD recipients, sending the rest along different pathways? And what if many of the people thought of as winners find themselves poorly prepared for the actual work of the professoriate? Preparing PhD students for diverse careers is not a distraction from the professorial career path most students apparently still expect and with which faculty are most comfortable. Data compiled by the AHA’s Career Diversity for Historians initiative tell us that only half of our PhDs do indeed make it through that gate (leaving aside those who leave programs before attaining a degree). Even if a history department has dropped the suggestion that those PhDs who pursue different pathways have failed, the curriculum tells a different story: the normative route is in the direction of research and teaching environments that consider the individual classroom the locus of accomplishment. The other 50 percent are often left to fend for themselves. Of those, nearly half pursue careers beyond the professoriate altogether, and a slightly smaller proportion finds employment teaching college off the tenure track. Career Diversity for Historians began with the imperative of expanding the employment horizons of and opportunities for history PhDs. Graduate programs are still preparing students for jobs that most of our PhD students will never occupy. Perhaps more important, we are squandering opportunities to increase the influence of historical thinking in contexts outside the professoriate. We are also squandering resources by ignoring those alumni who have not followed the route for which they were prepared. We asked those alumni—working in government, business, nonprofits, and higher education administration —what they wish they had learned, either to more easily find employment or to advance more quickly once hired. The responses fell into five broad categories: communication beyond the scholarly and classroom modes, collaboration, quantitative literacy, intellectual self- confidence, and digital literacy/engagement. We hoped that these skills could be easily woven into the existing fabric of doctoral programs and built the Career Diversity initiative on this strategy, supporting pilot programs to try some experiments. At the same time, along another track and with a different funder, we began to explore the implications of new insights into student learning for graduate education in history. These two initiatives in graduate education proceeded simultaneously with the Tuning project. The result is the crucial recognition that the skills history PhDs need for more diverse careers are the same skills they need to become the next generation of college professors. In addition to the 25 percent beyond the professoriate, nearly 60 percent of history PhDs are teaching either off the tenure track or in an environment other than a research university. They would need the same five groups of skills if they were to make valuable contributions to campuses that differed substantially from most PhD-granting institutions, and if their work focused on not only teaching but also curriculum design. Preparing PhD students for careers outside the professoriate does not constitute a distraction from the professorial career path that most students apparently still expect when they enter graduate school, and with which graduate faculty are most comfortable. The demands on teachers of undergraduates have changed. Assessment, student learning outcomes, and other alterations to the curriculum are now the purview of a majority of history faculty. Some of these changes are caused by shifts within academic administration, but it’s also the case that 20th-c​ entury pedagogical training is inadequate to the needs of today’s students, who are more diverse than ever before. Graduate students who hope to secure a tenure-track position will have to navigate this new environment. To a large extent, it is not the environment their advisers encountered when embarking on their own careers. History departments that begin not with normative assumptions about their students’ career paths but, instead, with actual data that is easy to compile can draw on the methodologies we have learned in Tuning: working backward from expected outcomes to define what students need to learn and then collaborating in the design and implementation of a curriculum geared toward those outcomes. We can prepare students for the higher education landscape of the future rather than the one we experienced and with which we are comfortable. Not all history PhD programs will teach the same things; not all students will follow identical paths. The Tuning project taught us that outcomes-based curriculum planning yields a variety of approaches, as broad as the range of universities that offer degrees. Reconsidering the goals of those degrees should include open and thorough reviews of the function and form of the dissertation. Thankfully, we don’t have to ask graduate students to decide on day one to pursue a single pathway. Strategically inclined students can figure out how to prepare themselves to travel in more than one direction, depending on how they respond to teaching, where their talents and inclinations lie, and what priorities emerge during their time in graduate school. They can prepare themselves to be better professors and better professionals with broad career options. The initiatives mentioned in this essay received generous support from Lumina Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Teagle Foundation. James Grossman is executive director of the AHA. He tweets @JimGrossmanAHA. Emily Swafford is the AHA’s manager of academic affairs. She tweets @elswafford.

NEWS Preserving Disability Heritage Gallaudet Inaugurates New Center for Deaf Documentary Studies Kritika Agarwal n the 1960s, NASA conducted an I experiment that involved housing a group of men in a room built on top of a centrifuge. The men ate, slept, and lived in the room for 10 days, all while it spun beneath them. When the experiment started, the men could barely stand up. But as their bodies got used to the shifting pulls of gravity, eventually they were able to walk, albeit leaning to the side to maintain their balance. Surprisingly, none of the men got sick. Members of this special group of volunteers were all deaf, specifically due to spinal meningitis, which had destroyed their inner ear labyrinths. In addition to the centrifuge experiment, they also participated in suborbital flights and motion sickness tests on US naval ships. Labeled “labyrinthine defective,” the men were students at Gallaudet College (now University); they played an important role in understanding the effects of weightlessness, motion, and balance on the human body as NASA prepared for its first mission to the moon. They were known as the Gallaudet 11. Today, Gallaudet’s new Center for Deaf Documentary Studies (CDDS) is bringing their stories to the public in the form of a lively exhibit featuring photos, oral interviews, digitized footage, and life-size cutouts of the 11 men preparing for centrifuge spins and free-falls in aircrafts. As the CDDS’s website describes, the exhibit seeks not only to educate the public about lesser-known deaf history, but also to ask purposeful questions about what it means for deaf people to be labeled “defective” by the government while providing valuable service to the nation. Disability studies and disability history have gained significant momentum in academia over the past two decades. Yet documenting the lives, histories, and cultures of disabled people remains fraught with challenges. As Michael Rembis and Susan Burch wrote in Disability Histories, “Historically, archives . . . and other troves of valuable sources located around the world did not include disabled people or disability-r​ elated terms in their indexes.” Similarly, they stated, social stigmas surrounding disability, as well as the persistence of views that disability constituted a medical condition signifying some kind of loss or deficit (as opposed to a socio-political or cultural construct), dissuaded institutions and academics from seeing disability as something that lay within the purview of historians. The CDDS is only the most recent of Gallaudet’s efforts to document and preserve deaf history. The initiative takes a four- pronged approach: discovering and identifying deaf-specific topics and issues that need further research; documenting deaf history and life by creating digital and narrative materials; disseminating these materials through a variety of avenues, including film screenings and exhibits; and educating Gallaudet students in the documentary arts, including technical and multimedia skills. This approach allows the CDDS to promote public understanding of what it means to be deaf or hard of hearing; it also preserves endangered cultural knowledge about deaf life held within the deaf community.

Brian H. Greenwald HTarhrye iOd.e a Laorfs ocnr, eaotinneg oafn the iGnatlelarud​ disect ip1li1n,a ryreviews a draft exhibition script with CDDS intern Mhuamggaien iKtoiepsp . center at Gallaudet to study the lives and histories of deaf people had been simmering for a while. As Brian H. Greenwald, director of the center and a professor of history at the university, noted in an e-mail interview, “Faculty and staff recognized that there was much expertise on campus related to the fields of deaf history, business, film, communication studies, deaf studies, English, and the visual and performing arts. There was not, however, a place that linked this expertise together to foster collaboration.” The CDDS came to fruition after the thirst for documenting deaf life became apparent during a university-wide forum hosted by Provost Stephen Weiner in November 2013. In a packed room, “person after person took to the stage giving passionate statements on the need for documenting the stories of deaf people in different formats,” said Greenwald. As one of a handful of institutions of higher education in the world completely devoted to the needs and education of deaf and hard-of-hearing students, Gallaudet had the resources and the expertise. Founded in 1864, the university’s Washington, DC, campus hosts the world’s largest collection of materials related to deaf life and the deaf community. In addition to the exhibit on the Gallaudet 11, the CDDS has several projects documenting deaf life and history in the pipeline. One involves producing a photo narrative book capturing the stories of about 40 deaf people who served as volunteers in the US Peace Corps, some as far back as 1967. Building on a prior exhibit at the university on the same topic, the book will use hundreds of pictures from the volunteers, many of whom were Gallaudet alumni, to discuss their experiences and the particular issues and challenges facing deaf people in the United States and around the world. The CDDS is also documenting stories of deaf New Yorkers, particularly the close-knit community of hundreds of deaf Jewish and Italian immigrants in Brooklyn during the mid-20th century. “Little has been done to record urban deaf life and the impact of having a geographically close community,” said Greenwald. The center, according to its website, plans to conduct “oral history” interviews to determine the particular linguistic, educational, and employment challenges faced by deaf urbanites. (Greenwald explained that “oral history” has dual meanings in the deaf community—narrative history documentation as well as history of oral or speech training. The latter has typically been a subject of much contention within the community.) Perhaps the most important work the center is doing, however, is collecting and preserving materials on deaf heritage. While this kind of work is important to every community, Greenwald argued that some aspects of deaf culture make these efforts unique: “Because approximately 90 percent of deaf people are born to hearing parents, they are usually the only deaf member of the family. Hearing families may not be aware of the cultural historic value of an individual’s collection [of personal artifacts]. There are accounts of deaf people’s films or photos being tossed out by family members who just never imagined that footage of people signing or visiting a school might be valuable.” Another challenge is the accessibility of deaf archives. In addition to making materials available in English and ASL, archives also have to consider other modes of communication, including visual and tactile signing as well as speech. Film, because of its ability to capture these forms of communication, is often the ideal medium for telling deaf stories. “Every step of the documentary process involves consideration of the audience and their access to the content,” said Greenwald. “Accessibility can never be an afterthought here.” In light of these challenges, the center will host a community event, Capturing Deaf Heritage, on October 28, 2016, with the goal of furthering the documentation of the American deaf community’s cultural heritage. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Common Heritage grant program, and held in collaboration with the university archives and museum, the daylong event will host workshops and presentations on the preservation of photographs, films, documents, and objects, as well as a discussion on the recovery of writings by deaf people. Greenwald noted that participants will have the opportunity to have original images and documents scanned and to leave with digital copies of their materials. Greenwald encouraged those unable to attend the event to contact the CDDS with ideas for collaboration: “The lived experiences of deaf people help us not only to understand a cultural community but also tell us a lot about what it means to be hearing in our society, and that offers a new framework of analysis of who we are. We all have much to learn.” Kritika Agarwal is associate editor, publications, at the AHA. She tweets @kritikaldesi.

NEWS Beyond “Roads Scholars” Perspectives from the AHA Committee on Non-Tenure- Track Faculty Lynn Y. Weiner and Philip Suchma he AHA has wrestled with the T issue of non- tenure-track faculty for over 20 years, producing several reports, collaborating with other professional associations, and endorsing a variety of policies, from salary recommendations and course-assignment strategies to the provision of work resources. According to a study sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as of 2012, 28 percent of history faculty at four-year colleges and universities were non- tenure-track, and nearly three-fourths of these were employed part time. Since this study relied on department reports, which are likely to underestimate the number of adjuncts, and did not include community colleges, it is possible that the percentage of non-tenure-track history faculty is even higher. We simply don’t have sufficient data to know precisely what the landscape of non-tenure- track history faculty looks like today. We do know, however, that there are fewer history tenure-track job opportunities, in part because of diminished undergraduate interest in the humanities, and an increasing reliance on non- tenure-track instructors. That over one in four history professors might be non-tenure-track raises questions not only about student learning but also about departmental work culture and the treatment, sometimes exploitative, of faculty hired in various contingent categories. In 2014, the AHA and its Teaching Division convened the Committee on Non-Tenure-Track Faculty to examine the current situation of non- tenure-track teachers in history departments. The committee included five historians—all past or current adjuncts, two of whom had eventually become deans responsible for hiring. The committee was charged with examining faculty data, surveying working conditions, offering cost- conscious recommendations, considering collaboration with other scholarly societies, and proposing future research. With these objectives in mind, the committee conducted a survey among non-t​ enure-track faculty, department chairs, and history students. Responses came from 667 faculty, 172 department chairs, and 500 students, representing community colleges, private colleges, state universities, and Research 1 institutions. Importantly, although we refer to non- tenure-track faculty as a group, the responses revealed that the category is much more complex than in the past. It does include course-by-course adjuncts —or “roads scholars” long assumed to be the majority of faculty off the tenure track—but it also comprises a growing number of historians in half-time and full-time annual or multi-year appointments. This difficulty in determining the exact nature of non- tenure-track employment is one of the most important reasons we need to design better studies and gather precise data on this rapidly changing population of historians. The report was introduced at a session titled “Off the Tenure Track but in the Classroom: Are There Short Term Reforms That Can Make a Difference for Faculty and Students?” at the 2016 AHA annual meeting in Atlanta. The audience discussed the report as well as the diverse teaching experiences and career paths of the committee members. Graduate students made up the majority of this audience and told us that they were concerned about the stability of the profession as they entered the job market. There were no full-time faculty or department chairs present in the audience, reinforcing the perception that they lack interest in the issue. One participant urged the AHA to join forces with the Organization of American Historians (OAH) to improve the condition of faculty off the tenure track. The non-tenure-track faculty survey highlighted issues of income, course assignments, treatment by institutional colleagues, and impact on students. Not surprisingly, non- tenure-track faculty voiced concerns about the lack of economic stability (teaching for as little as $1,400 per course). Many also mentioned the uncertainty of course assignments, as they were often hired with little advance notice or laid off because of last-minute class cancellations. Non-t​ enure- track faculty also reported feeling like second-class citizens, having few opportunities for interaction with tenured and tenure-track colleagues, and being excluded from meetings, decision making, and social events. Finally, there was consistent discontent about the dearth of basic resources needed to teach effectively and the lack of opportunity for meeting students outside of class—a practice crucial to encouraging student success. At the same time, almost 93 percent of non- tenure-track faculty surveyed agreed that their teaching met or exceeded the pedagogical standards of their departments. The department chair survey had some surprises —about three-fourths of the chairs had at one time in their careers worked as non-tenure-track faculty (excluding graduate assistantships). In contrast to non-tenure-track faculty, the chairs, almost 88 percent of whom worked in four-year institutions, presented a more positive perception of working conditions. It is possible that these results would have been different had the survey yielded greater responses from chairs in community colleges and two-year institutions. Students confirmed our understanding that they were largely indifferent to the hiring status of their professors. When asked whether they knew the difference between tenured/tenure-track faculty and non-tenure- track faculty, the results were divided almost equally. Some students rated the quality of non- tenure-track faculty highly, reporting them to be passionate and rigorous, but also raising concerns about their limited availability outside of class. Based on these responses, the committee made several recommendations to the AHA Council, which approved them in January 2016. These recommendations include: ◆ Improving nomenclature to describe the variety of historians teaching off the tenure track. These include part-time, half- time, and full-time professors hired by the course, by the semester or year, and on multi- year contracts. ◆ Cooperating with other scholarly societies, including re-e​ stablishing collaboration with the OAH. ◆ Issuing guidelines for a more inclusive, equitable, and respectful work culture to enhance the success of non- tenure-track colleagues in the classroom. These include clearly stating evaluation procedures, including non-t​ enure- track teachers in department and university events, acknowledging teaching and research achievements, and providing access to such basic working tools as mailboxes, e-mail accounts, computers and copy machines, parking, office space, teaching development workshops, and, when possible, to benefits and conference funds. Above all, we learned how much we don’t know, and recommend that the AHA initiate a more sophisticated survey that can better incorporate and analyze the qualitative experiences of non-tenure- track faculty in the history discipline. And while not a subject of the report, we also urge the AHA to continue to explore ways to promote career development for historians teaching off the tenure track. The economic and workplace exploitation of non-tenure-track faculty is not a problem unique to historians. Non-tenure- track faculty and their supporters from many disciplines have formed such organizations as the New Faculty Majority and the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor to explore methods for direct advocacy. But this challenge is one that historians can and must confront. While about a third of our non-tenure- track faculty work in institutions with adjunct unions that set minimum standards for employment, the majority teach in environments subject to wildly varying institutional cultures. While the AHA has endorsed most of our recommendations time and again, they have not yet become standard practice in history departments. At the least, a policy of inclusion and respect could begin the process of improving both the working conditions of one- fourth of our faculty and the classroom experiences of our students. We thank the Teagle Foundation for its financial support, and Emily Swafford of the AHA for overseeing the survey logistics. Lynn Y. Weiner is university historian and dean emerita of the College of Arts and Sciences at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Philip Suchma has been working as an adjunct professor in the city of New York since 2006. He teaches in the history departments at St. John’s University and at Lehman College, CUNY, and also instructs American studies courses at the School of Professional and Continuing Studies at Fordham University.

NEWS ORCID Blooms How Unique Identification Numbers Can Aid Research and Discovery Seth Denbo n the final decade of the second millennium, I embarked on my first Imajor research explorations. Readers who recall those prelapsarian times will no doubt look back on laboring at the coalface of CD-ROM periodical catalogs and stand-alone library OPACs with a mixture of nostalgia and dread. But those hard- won accordion-bound printouts we lugged with us had a stolidness that saw us through years of research. The limited tools with which we dug through the vaults of the Bodleian or the Bibliothèque Nationale provided an illusion of completeness that seems naive in this infinitely more interconnected world. While anyone who has done archival research knows how much of the record of the past isn’t (and never will be) digital, it is undeniable that the web has transformed much of what scholars do to find sources. Now, many published works of scholarship can be found on the web. The benefits of this are difficult to overstate, but this proliferation has also led to complexity. Historians conducting their research on the web, either through their library or via services like Google Scholar, find far more than they can handle. Quality varies, and managing results, despite the existence of citation management software, takes lots of work. Enter ORCID—an open, community-driven effort to create and manage unique identifiers for researchers. ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, helps scholars make their own publications easily discoverable by others and simplifies the process of finding works by a particular individual. Scholars can use their unique ORCID identification number to attach their identity to anything they produce or publish. The number stays constant regardless of changes to institutional affiliation. ORCID numbers can be linked to all publications and outputs, whether scholarly or aimed at a general audience, including journal articles, books, blog posts, op-eds, or any other formal or informal productions. ORCID identifiers can also be included when submitting manuscripts for publication or applying for grants, thus maintaining links to all of a scholar’s publications. Scholars can link their name and ID number to anything they produce using their ORCID record. Historians benefit by distinguishing their work from other researchers’ and making it easier to discover. For scholars with common names, the benefits are obvious. But even for those with unusual monikers, ORCID can offset confusion caused by name changes, variations in how scholars refer to themselves in publications, or discrepancies in how people responsible for record keeping list names in finding aids or catalogs. Obtaining an identification number that can be linked to all of one’s publications removes these ambiguities. It also allows libraries and others that manage information systems to unequivocally identify scholars and their work. As the context in which we conduct our scholarship becomes increasingly international, and as information systems grow more integrated and consequently more central to the discovery of scholarship, ORCID identifiers and like tools will become a vital part of how we present our work. Unambiguously linking a work to its creator benefits the individual scholar as well as the overall scholarship produced by historians. It promotes communication between scholars within and across fields by giving them the means to connect all of their publications, analog or digital. ORCID also makes it easier for scholars to be recognized for their full range of contributions to our discipline. It embeds our work firmly in the mechanisms for discovery that grow in importance all the time. o register for an T ORCID number, go to www.orcid.org. The registration process is very quick, and you can add information to your ORCID record at your leisure. The AHA has also added a field to our membership database, so you can fill in your ORCID number when you join or renew your membership, or add it right away by going to historians.org/updateinfo (on page 3). AHA members can find colleagues’ ORCID identifiers in the Member Directory, which can be accessed from historians.org/myaha. This useful tool will help promote the value of history by better integrating historians into the global network of scholarly communication. There are other kinds of unique author identifiers, such as the International Standard Name Identifier. Libraries have also long been in the business of creating systems for disambiguating authors’ names. The Library of Congress and the Virtual International Authority File project provide tools to ensure that the variety of names an author publishes under are all linked to each other in one record. ORCID, by contrast, allows scholars to manage their own profiles and easily add publications of any kind, not only those that are officially cataloged by libraries. ORCID identifiers are spreading fast. Almost 2 million researchers in every imaginable field have registered for them. Even some of the most venerable learned societies are getting involved.The Philosophical Transactions, first published in 1665, is the oldest continually published academic journal in the world, predating our own American Historical Review by over 300 years. Its publisher, the Royal Society, announced earlier this year that all authors submitting to its journals would be required to provide their ORCID number. In doing so it joined a growing array of journal publishers and associations that see the benefits of ORCID identification numbers. Part of remaining vital and integral is adapting to changed circumstances. ORCID identification for researchers responds to a problem that has developed with the enormous growth of the publication of research and the variety of computer-based tools we now use to discover scholarship. Seth Denbo is the director of scholarly communication and digital initiatives at the AHA. He tweets at @seth_denbo, and his ORCID identifier is 0000- 0002-1577-8785. ADVOCACY From the National Coalition for History Fighting to Save an Endangered Revolutionary War Battlefield Lee White common misconception A about the National Coalition for History is that almost all of what we do, and care about, is focused inside the Beltway, on issues predominantly dealing with Congress and federal agencies. However, NCH has also been a strong advocate in historic preservation cases. In years past, we joined with one of our member organizations, the Civil War Trust, in two high- profile preservation battles. NCH helped prevent the licensing of a casino on a site a half mile from Gettysburg National Military Park and joined a coalition of historical and environmental groups to persuade Wal-Mart to abandon a plan to build a superstore adjacent to the Wilderness Civil War Battlefield. Now, once again, the NCH is joining forces with the Civil War Trust, this time to advocate for the preservation of a Revolutionary War battlefield: the site of the Battle of Princeton, which took place on January 3, 1777. Along with many other historical, preservation, and environmental groups, NCH is opposing construction on private property where George Washington charged the British Army, leading to victory. The attack came on the heels of Washington’s victory against the Hessians a few days before. Historians consider the two battles a turning point in the Revolution. Aside from the pivotal role it played in the Revolution, the Battle of Princeton was also the first land battle where the Continental Marines fought. The land in question, known as the Maxwell’s Field tract, is owned by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). The institute is a private, independent academic body located in Princeton; it is not associated with Princeton University. According to the Save Princeton Coalition, “Although a portion of the battlefield is preserved within Princeton Battlefield State Park, 22 acres of adjacent land owned by the Institute remains unprotected and subject to development.” The contentious battle over this historical property has gone on longer than the American Revolution itself. In 2003, the IAS announced plans to build faculty housing there. Since then, the institute has sought to quell opposition by downsizing the project: building townhouses and homes on seven acres and constructing a 200-foot buffer zone between its development and the state park. The Civil War Trust has repeatedly offered to acquire the Maxwell’s Field tract for $4.5 million (more than $1 million above the appraised value of the property). The nonprofit Princeton Battlefield Society, founded in 1971, has been fighting the IAS since the early 1990s to forestall development in the area.1 Unfortunately, despite these lengthy efforts by preservationists and historians, the institute has received the permitting authority it needs to proceed. It began bulldozing the property and started preliminary construction this past fall. Opponents are now trying to question whether the development is violating the federal Clean Water Act due to the destruction of wetlands at the site.2 In a 2007 report to Congress, the National Park Service (NPS) undertook a comprehensive review of Revolutionary War battlefields. The NPS has labeled the battlefield a Priority I site, its highest designation, given only to the most historically significant and most endangered sites.3 In addition, in 1961 the Princeton Battlefield was designated by the secretary of the interior as a National Historic Landmark and listed as threatened by the Park Service in 2002.4 In its report, the Park Service urged all levels of government and national organizations to focus their preservation efforts on Priority I sites, such as Princeton. A 2010 mapping study funded by the NPS confirms that the battle occurred on the property. The contentious battle over the Maxwell’s Field tract in Princeton has gone on longer than the American Revolution itself. The National Trust for Historic Preservation included Princeton Battlefield in its 2012 list of the nation’s “11 Most Endangered Historic Places.”5 Historian David Hackett Fischer, in a letter to the National Trust, said, “This land is as central to the battle of Princeton as the field of Pickett’s Charge is to Gettysburg and as Omaha Beach is to D-Day.” The Save Princeton Coalition (#SavePrinceton) is composed of the American Association for State and Local History, the American Revolution Institute of the Society of Cincinnati, the Civil War Trust (through its Campaign 1776 initiative), the Cultural Landscape Foundation, the National Coalition for History, the National Parks Conservation Association, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Princeton Battlefield Society, and the New Jersey Chapter of the Sierra Club. For updated information about the continuing fight to save the Princeton Battlefield, visit the Civil War Trust’s Campaign 1776 at http://www.campaign1776.org/take- action/speak- out/princeton/. Lee White is executive director of the National Coalition for History. Notes 1. http://www.theprincetonbattlefieldsociety. 2-12.pdf 2. http://www.campaign1776.org/take- action/speak- out/princeton/princeton- faq.html 3. http://www.nps.gov/abpp/Rev1812_Final_Report.pdf 4. http://www.theprincetonbattlefieldsocie 2-12.pdf 5. https://savingplaces.org/11most- past-listings#.VtC9-vkrLcs COLUMNS From the National History Center Meeting the Challenges of Influencing Policy Amanda Moniz verything has a history. More than a catchy phrase, that Estatement underlies the National History Center’s Congressional Briefings program: understanding the past improves policy making today. Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the center holds four briefings per year on Capitol Hill, bringing historical perspectives to issues before Congress. Briefings in 2015–16 have examined mass incarceration in the United States from the 19th century to the present, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its legacy, and congressional partisanship from the early republic to the present. We are now in the midst of planning for a spring briefing on the history of drug policy and drug epidemics. (For a full listing of the center’s briefings, blog recaps, and video links, see nationalhistorycenter.org/about/program- descriptions/congressional- briefings.) In the American associational state, every issue also has an array of groups with a variety of perspectives to offer. With so many constituencies having perspectives on each issue, policy makers have many demands on their time. That means that we must put a great deal of effort into the spade work of connecting historians and policy makers. Over the past year, the center’s briefings have enjoyed a broad reach. The average attendance at the center’s briefings is 35–40 people, usually including congressional staffers, staff at government agencies, journalists, historians, and members of the public. But the briefings reach a much larger audience, for they are typically filmed by C- SPAN or a center videographer. Educating members of the public about the historical dimensions of current events and showcasing historians’ participation in policy conversations are, we believe, important facets of the program. History and Policy for Students and Educators n offshoot of the A center’s Congressional Briefings program is the Mock Policy Briefing Program, which helps college and high school students discern the relevance of history to issues we confront today. Using the initiative’s guide (historians.org/mockpolicybooklet educators and students craft and host briefings on the historical background of local, state, or national policy questions before an invited audience of local leaders. Temple University’s Jessica Roney piloted the program in a course on the history of Philadelphia as her students prepared to give a briefing on poverty in Philadelphia from 1775 to the present. Through the process, the students gained an understanding of long-term developments that shaped today’s economic conditions, inequality, responses to poverty, and more. They also honed their research skills, their ability to work collaboratively, their writing, and their oral presentation skills. (See the blog posts at blog.historians.org/category/national- history-center.) We believe the program is applicable not just to American history courses, but to almost every history course, since all address issues that carry contemporary implications or parallels. We are organizing several workshops, including one to be held at the 2017 AHA annual meeting in Denver, to teach educators how to implement the program. (To learn more and for an educators’ guide, see historians.org/nhc- mock-policy-briefing- program.) Amanda Moniz While the center’s briefings are more successful at reaching members of the public than we had anticipated they would be, reaching our intended audience has been harder. Over the past year, we have been learning why. First, cultivating personal relationships with congressional staffers is critical, but it is time- consuming. Like other organizations, the NHC generally draws a half dozen staffers to each briefing. Yet we now recognize that one measure of the program’s success consists of the relationships historians forge with policy makers. Unlike Washington organizations that focus on a narrow range of issues that involve networking with a limited number of staffers, we aim to bring historical perspectives to many issues and seek to engage with staffers on many committees. Our network on the Hill consequently needs to be broader and stronger than that of most comparable organizations. The briefings program has also prompted us to think differently about what sort of history matters in particular contexts. The congressional staffers we have gotten to know have asked us to provide historical perspective on topics we simply had not considered, such as the history of trade agreements or the impact of American legislation on foreign nations. They share our view that understanding the past will help them make better policy. They have had to educate us, however, about the sorts of historical questions that are relevant to their legislative work. To meet these challenges, we have been building relationships with policy makers and asking them how historians can help. We have established Historians on the Hill, a group of congressional staffers with history degrees, to assist us in attracting their colleagues to briefings and, most importantly, advise us on topics and approaches that will be useful to them (see sidebar). Similarly, we are developing closer ties with historians who work for the Congressional Research Service. In response to lawmakers’ requests, they provide historical background on legislative issues to members of Congress and their staffs. We anticipate that they will teach us about fruitful ways to bring historical perspectives to policy makers. Historians on the Hill Justene G. Hill s historians, we A recognize that historical perspectives can offer us more complex and more nuanced understandings of the world we live in today. At the National History Center, we use this message to connect historians to policy makers through our Congressional Briefings program. To foster deeper relationships between historians and policy makers, we have created Historians on the Hill. This group comprises congressional staffers who have undergraduate and graduate degrees in history. Our goal with Historians on the Hill is to forge relationships with Hill staffers who are interested in working with us to augment our Congressional Briefings program. By partnering with Hill staffers, we will have a network of people with whom we can communicate about future Congressional Briefings. Ultimately, we hope that Historians on the Hill will help us advance the National History Center’s mission of bringing historians’ perspectives on modern policy issues to the public sphere. A subset of Historians on the Hill is the Historians on the Hill Advisory Council. The Advisory Council is a small group of people, including Hill staffers, professors, and historians working in the federal government, who strategize with us to make the Congressional Briefings program reach broader audiences on Capitol Hill. We look to this group to help us accomplish two overarching goals. The first is to increase the number of Hill staffers who attend our briefings, thereby expanding the draw of the program. We will look to our Advisory Council for advice on the most effective strategies to attract Hill staffers to our briefings, from rethinking our social media outreach to tailoring the briefings to address hot-button congressional debates. Our second goal in forming the Historians on the Hill Advisory Council is to use the members as a resource to inform us about the most important policy debates occurring in Congress today. There are four members of the Historians on the Hill Advisory Council. The chair of the Advisory Council is Molly Michelmore, associate professor of history at Washington and Lee University. Michelmore, a former congressional staffer, is a historian of 20th-century American political history and author of Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism (2011). Two other members are current Hill staffers who have attended NHC Congressional Briefings. They have already offered valuable insight into how staffers on Capitol Hill can use historians’ perspectives to make policy recommendations to members of Congress. Sandra Delany, a graduate of the University of Maryland, is the speechwriter for Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland. John Richter is the legislative assistant for Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico. Our fourth Advisory Council member is Washington, DC, writer Marc Levinson. Levinson, a historian of economic and American business history, has authored several books and articles on business development and finance during the 20th century. In the next month, the Advisory Council will meet to discuss a targeted campaign for advertising our upcoming Congressional Briefings, with the goal of increasing Hill staffer attendance by 20 percent. The Advisory Council’s long-term goal for 2016 is to increase Hill staffer attendance by 50 percent. (Watch AHA Today at blog.historians.o​ rg for interviews with Advisory Council members.) We are excited about cultivating a dynamic relationship with the Historians on the Hill group and the Historians on the Hill Advisory Council. By augmenting our outreach campaign through a sustained effort to attract congressional staffers to our Congressional Briefings program, we will also be connecting lawmakers to historians working on topics of legislative importance. Historians on the Hill and its Advisory Council are crucial allies in promoting the National History Center’s mission of reinforcing historical knowledge in the nation’s policy-making sphere. Justene G. Hill is program coordinator for the Historians on the Hill program at the National History Center. She received her PhD in US history from Princeton University in 2015. A center-sponsored panel at the AHA annual meeting in Atlanta gave us insight about how to pursue our program. Organized by Roger Launius of the National Air and Space Museum and a member of the center’s Program Committee, the panel, titled “Pressing Issues: History Meets Public Policy Roundtable,” also featured Elena Aranova (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara), Brian Balogh (Univ. of Virginia), Elena Comis (Emory Univ.), James Rodger Fleming (Colby Coll.), and Alan Kraut, a member of the center’s Program Committee (American Univ.). The panelists discussed how they have contributed to policy conversations. One conclusion was that it was each panelist’s knowledge of a particular topic that opened doors to the policy world. One of our tasks is to help other interested historians build similar connections. We therefore are planning to hold occasional, more intimate conversations between historians and staffers from our Historians on the Hill group around a focused issue. Our efforts in the coming year will focus on expanding networks between historians and congressional staffers, learning about—and educating other historians about—the historical questions that matter to staffers’ work, and bringing more visibility to historians’ contributions to policy conversations. We welcome our colleagues’ collaboration in this endeavor. Amanda Moniz is assistant director of the National History Center. VIEWPOINTS What Do We Mean by “Value”? It’s Time to Challenge the Carnegie Classifications Peter N. Stearns t’s no secret that these are difficult days for I the humanities. Evaluations of higher education increasingly privilege the incomes of graduates, and while these measures do not uniformly favor STEM (contrary to some belief), the data certainly tend to downgrade humanities graduates. Though they typically do earn less, they are far from unemployed, as the myth would have it (see http://bit.ly/1kMBTTM for a corrective). Yet political candidates take easy potshots at humanities programs, playing off and encouraging a sense of low utility. Obviously, in this context, humanists worry, but we also fight back. We know we teach skills and insights vital to a healthy society, beginning with critical thinking. We know we add knowledge—for example, about how the present has emerged from the past. We know that without our disciplines and kindred social sciences, American society would lose its capacity to evaluate and address a host of crucial issues. Amid this kind of debate, it seems one specific target has gone unnoticed: the essential neglect of humanities research in one of the most hallowed American classification systems, the Carnegie ratings, now administered by Indiana University. It’s time to initiate a discussion of alternatives, complex as this might be. Here’s the situation. Since 1973, the Carnegie classifications have served not only as descriptors but also as aspirational targets for a variety of higher education institutions. Their range of measurements includes undergraduate offerings and the various degree levels, most of which represent a number of disciplines and not just the sanctification of STEM. But the high-prestige categories, not surprisingly, involve categorizations of research, with the Very High Research cluster of about 200 institutions at the summit. And here’s the problem for the humanities—a​ nd arguably, for a real assessment of significant research. Understandably eager to seize on purely numerical data, the Carnegie classifications measure research intensities disproportionately by levels of external funding. Whatever the validity of this proxy for STEM, it does not address the normal measures of achievement in the humanities. The A. D. White Reading Room in Cornell University’s Uris Library To be fair, the rankings do consider the number of PhDs universities confer —h​ umanities fields very much included—and this weighting seems to play a role in distinguishing the three Carnegie doctoral classifications. A new system would not necessarily radically alter institutional balances, though this index will deteriorate further as a research measure as market forces contribute to the decline of the number of PhDs awarded. But funding levels are at best tangential to assessing the value of humanities research, and this is a genuine problem in this critical period. Funding levels simply do not predictably capture value in these disciplines, at least in the United States. (See http://humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx? i=86#fig386 on the disproportions in funding levels—another indication of the weakness of this criterion in measuring humanities value for an entire university.) And we should be discussing value. The Carnegie classifications measure research intensities disproportionally by levels of external funding. Whatever the validity of this proxy for STEM, it does not address the normal measures of achievement in the humanities. So let’s press the new masters of the Carnegie system to join with representatives of the humanities and social sciences to discuss additional measures that do not depend solely on funding yet explicitly embrace significant research in these vital fields. Admittedly, decisions will not be easy: I am not advocating anything as simple as a book and article count; we would not want to fall into the system the British have generated, where sheer productivity trumps substantive results. Our goal should be a manageable set of measurements that conveys consequential research across the disciplinary spectrum, but also pushes humanists to do a better job of defining the impact of their work. Objections might surface from a few institutions with weak humanities programs, but the playing field already varies a great deal—for example, depending on the presence or absence of medical schools—so this kind of additional differentiation is really not problematic. If the new criterion encourages a few places to pay more attention to serious humanities scholarship, all the better. But the main point is a fairer representation of how much meaningful research is being done, in a nation where funding is unusually skewed toward a limited number of disciplines. At the very least, pending some responsible reform, we can at least hope that the descriptions of the research categories will include a much clearer disclaimer about the mis-​ impressions that reliance on funding levels may foster. Greater clarity, and perhaps some desirable embarrassment, would be a constructive first step. But let’s try to launch an imaginative discussion that goes beyond this. I thank Robert Townsend of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for help with this piece, though the opinions are my responsibility. Peter N. Stearns is university professor and provost emeritus at George Mason University.

FEATURES Beyond Big Brother Turning ID Cards into Weapons of Citizenship Jose Ragas ou know something odd is Y happening when, instead of conventional memes or funny-looking cats, dozens of photos of ID cards suddenly show up in your social networks. First surfacing in November 2015, this unusual thread of identity documents had a specific purpose: it was a response to an alleged demand by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump that the country register its Muslim citizens and require them to carry special ID cards. Muslim citizens responded creatively: using the hashtag #MuslimID, they uploaded photos of their ID cards to Twitter and Instagram. The #MuslimID campaign showcased the many ways American Muslims serve their country and community, through military ID badges, driver’s licenses, congressional and university passes, diplomatic passports, and attorney registration cards. “Efdal,” a software engineer, shared photos of herself wearing a hijab: “I am proud of my identity and wear my ID everyday.” “Amanda,” on the other hand, described herself as an “entrepreneur, mom of two, granddaughter of Union Founder, AMERICAN.” Sami H. Elmansoury shared his grandfather’s certificate as part of the team that launched Apollo 11 in 1969. Using ID cards to combat prejudice and segregation isn’t new. As with the #MuslimID campaign, citizens of various nationalities in the past have repurposed ID cards to assert citizenship and advocate for inclusion, resisting IDs’ original function as instruments of surveillance. Similarly, governments the world over have recognized their power as symbols, using them to enfold individuals into national membership, not simply to control and monitor their populations. As such, ID cards have become icons of a relationship between citizens and the state—a relation that’s contentious, not static. ID cards are formidable primary sources. In one portable artifact, they combine technologies of identification developed over centuries (including personal signatures, names and surnames, photos, and fingerprints). Identity cards belong to the realm of technologies we use every day. They have accompanied us for a very long time, acquiring different forms and meanings with one common purpose: to fix our identities and to provide authorities with a tool to authenticate them. To historians interested in the genealogy of biometrics, ID cards offer an opportunity to explore broader issues of citizenship, not only through a top-down analysis, but also by examining subaltern groups’ use of them to claim recognition or inclusion. Such strategies have included producing counterfeits or modifying the various traditional personal categories that appear on ID cards. The history of ID cards involves policy makers, private actors, and individuals. It also incorporates issues of manufacture, stabilization, and circulation. In a broader sense, IDs reveal the tensions between assimilation and segregation, empowerment and invisibility, and oppression and conformity. The global presence of ID cards also allows us to trace how they have been reconfigured and adapted to local settings. Professor María Eugenia Ulfe (Pontifical Catholic Univ. of Peru) holds up an eOnlarriggeinda IlDly c ard ecsrieganteedd by bPyeruvian artist and activist Giuseppe Campuzano (1969–2013) during an April 2014 rally in support of gay marriage in Lima. The I1D9 tbhe-lcoenngtsu troy Capmrpoufezsasnio’ns aDl NI (De Natura Incertus) collection in pTroalviceest i del aPnedrú . biometric experts, ID cards were a tactic of imposing order on a world changing rapidly under industrialization, global migrations of people, and a rise in urban crime. Where there were once myriad categories of identification—based on traditional and informal face-to-face recognition practices—these small documents helped reduce and stabilize the methods of identifying different segments of the population, especially those considered criminal. At the same time, however, they reinforced the idea of individualism—that each person had a unique identity, as the only one who possessed a certain combination of these categories. This semblance of uniqueness, along with the documents’ portability, contributed to authorities’ and biometric experts’ perception that they were effective in tracking down human targets. In the early 20th century, Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, and other identity documents inspired a constellation of new forms of personal IDs, manufactured by such nongovernment entities as political parties, private companies, and civic associations. These documents paved the way for universal registration, thus becoming powerful wellsprings of social and political rights for underrepresented groups in the last decades: think of the movement to allow undocumented immigrants to acquire driver’s licenses. Yet ID cards did not lose their roots in surveillance. Throughout the 20th century, they continued to be used to target minorities and perpetuate exclusion, sometimes with horrifying results (for example, in Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, and Rwanda during the final phase of the civil war). Governments have also continued to take full advantage of the capacity of ID cards to integrate minorities and to curb inequality and segregation. The most ambitious of these projects is underway in India, where the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) plans to grant personal documents to approximately 1 billion people to provide social services and universal health care. In California, authorities are granting driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants in order to prevent them from being expelled from the country and to provide them the opportunity to obtain work permits. The New York municipal identification card (IDNYC) includes benefits such as free passes or discounts to museums, theaters, and parks, as part of a more ambitious plan to integrate immigrants into the community. For a significant number of beneficiaries, this will be their first identity document after having spent a lifetime invisible to authorities, institutions, and even fellow nationals. Though authorities seem to embrace civil registration as the main purpose of IDs, over the past decades identity cards have generated much controversy among underrepresented groups, for they can establish and legitimize categories of personhood that signal a vulnerable status. They can be a way to claim the protection of the state. For example, in a foundational study, anthropologist Gaston Gordillo examined “ID-paper fetishism” among the Toba and the Wichí in the Chaco province of Argentina. As has been done with many other indigenous groups, the state issued “certificates of good conduct” that granted the holders temporary protection from abusive landowners and army officers looking for workers and recruits.1 Repeated contact with these papers, and recognition of their inherent benefits, showed the Toba and the Wichí that they could avoid violence and mistreatment by showing identity papers to strangers. Native Americans and indigenous populations have also appropriated the idea of identity documents to subvert their subordinate status. Members of the Iroquois Confederacy, for example, refuse to use either American or Canadian passports. Instead, they have designed their own passports, which serve not only as a reminder of their struggle for sovereignty but also meet international security standards. (Canadian authorities, meanwhile, deem these papers “fantasy documents.”)2 In recent years, members of the transgender community have demanded the right to change their sex or name on their ID cards, posing challenges to the binary legal system and inciting public debates. This initiative was backed by the Bolivian government a few months ago, when President Evo Morales approved the Law of Gender Identity, allowing more than 1,500 transgender citizens to modify gender markers in their personal documents. The reluctance of other governments to update official categories reinforces the vulnerability of the transgender community. Civic associations like the Fundación Santamaria in Colombia have started to develop unofficial ID cards on which transgender sex workers provide their chosen identity, including their current name but no designated gender. The group has been successful in negotiating with authorities and hospitals to acknowledge the alternate ID card and provide basic health services, such as free HIV tests. These are just a few examples of how ID cards (or such of their components as fingerprints, mug shots, signatures, or official categories) have possessed multiple, contested cultural and political meanings. Our optimism regarding the ways ID cards are empowering people in different parts of the world and encouraging them to demand social and political rights should not make us forget that identification is not yet a definitive tool of citizenship. Identification —as well as the devices and artifacts designed to register people’s identities —will continue to serve as an arena of encounter as much as one of dispute between formerly invisible populations and those who seek to keep them in the shadows. Jose Ragas is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow associate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He holds a PhD in history from University of California, Davis (2015). Currently he is working on his first book, focusing on the emergence of an early biometric state in Peru. Notes 1. Gaston Gordillo, “The Crucible of Citizenship: ID-Paper Fetishism in the Argentinian Chaco,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 2 (2006): 162–76. 2. Sid Hill, “My Six Nation Haudenosaunee Passport Is Not a ‘Fantasy Document,’” The Guardian, October 30, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/30/my- six-nation-haudenosaunee- passport-not-fantasy- document-indigenous- nations. FEATURES Lab Partners Experimenting with Active Learning Gabriel Pizzorno and Heidi Tworek ne truism about World War I is the incompetence of German propaganda in Othe United States. The classic stories feature German officials forgetting briefcases with secret documents on the New York subway and ham- fistedly delivering speeches about German culture. But what if we look beyond urban centers to examine the thousands of news items from a German news agency printed in American newspapers during the war? And what if we integrate students into this research adventure?1 Over the past few years, the history department at Harvard University, where one of us teaches and the other has taught, has implemented an independent-study course, History Lab, that uses active learning to offer students hands-on experience in historical research and digital methods. Conceived by Dan Smail in 2013, the course addressed a long- standing desire among undergraduates to get involved in research. It also reflected growing faculty interest in applying digital methods and teaching these skills to history majors. Participating faculty propose research projects. Students register for a project and meet weekly with the faculty member; they receive ordinary course credit and must produce a final product (for example, an online exhibition or a visualization) comparable to a major term paper. They also consult regularly with the department’s digital historian, Gabe Pizzorno, who coordinates the methodological aspects common to all the projects. As with any craft, students need practice and the opportunity to learn from their mistakes before they can acquire proficiency in transforming the raw materials of the past into new narrative forms. Research papers and senior theses allow students to stumble on their own; History Lab uses the collaborative nature of digital scholarship to foster collective rather than individual learning. The lab creates a safe, communal space where students can experiment and learn to embrace failure. It confronts them with the wild diversity of raw primary materials and teaches them how to forge the tools they will use to analyze their sources. The focus on digital methods enables students to collaborate easily on projects while gaining new skills. History Lab offered four projects in spring 2015. Jill Lepore’s “The Dickens Log” created a relational database tracking Charles Dickens’s 1842 travels through the United States. Genevieve Clutario’s “Visualizing Colonial Philippines” developed an online archive of images of Filipino women during the American colonial period. Dimiter Angelov’s “The Byzantine Provinces” mapped views of Constantinople included in saints’ lives, letters, and sermons from the provinces between the 10th and the 12th centuries. Heidi Tworek’s “The History of News” explored the influence of German news sent by wireless to the United States during its years of neutrality in World War I. This project showed the promises and pitfalls of this pedagogical experiment and provides an excellent case study in how to structure a lab. “The History of News” his lab tested the T prevalent scholarly narrative about the ineffectiveness of German propaganda in the United States. Participants examined digitized newspapers across the US to see what news from Germany was printed and where. The data amounted to hundreds of thousands of pages, making close- reading approaches infeasible. In the first half of the semester, students learned how to download newspaper articles en masse from online archives and create a database to catalog them. Our sample consisted of over 11,000 articles, complete with associated PDFs. At least 5,000 had fully searchable text. In the second half of the sMeampe sshteorw, ing ethaec hn umbsteur doef nAtmerican newspapers chitiongse theto O vienrvsesatsi gNateew s oAngeency, 1915–17, and their political leaning. Live versions of this and other masappesc t of cathn at datbaes et. seen at https://jonathanedwardpalmer.cartodb.com/maps. Shtotpms:e// jounsaetdh atnoepdiwc amrdpoadlemleinr.gcartodb.com/maps. to explore which subjects appeared most often. Others mapped the correlation between first- and second-generation German-Americans (about 9 percent of the US total in 1910) and the number of papers printing news from Germany. There were no predetermined tools or software. If students learned to use a particular tool, we wanted them to justify that choice methodologically within the context of historical inquiry. Our class meetings often revolved around workshopping. The lab introduced students to the recursive process of formulating questions and finding ways to interrogate the data for answers, only to have to revise their questions or collect new data in response to problems. It encouraged reflection upon the research process itself and its inherent frustrations, such as the limits of sources, problems gathering data, and the difficulties of interpretation. The Lab e embarked upon W the projects with a sense of adventure. There were frequent roadblocks: literal ones, such as an online database banning us briefly for downloading too many articles by mistake, and figurative ones, particularly when students became frustrated with tools not designed for historical research. But the possibility of genuinely new discoveries pushed the work forward. The struggle, and occasional failure, to find solutions to research problems ultimately made the class more rewarding. It also encouraged the students to think critically about the issues surrounding digital methods (like copyright, uneven digitization of sources, and digital gatekeeping through paid subscriptions to databases). Although the class was designed to be collaborative, students could have splintered into their individual projects after the initial, joint stages of work, yet they continued to act as teams. They often talked about how much they enjoyed conducting research as a group rather than alone, and several participants offered to continue with the project after the semester ended. Challenges erhaps the most P challenging aspect of using digital methods is the initial investment of time and effort required for students to learn the basics of a particular technique. It is tempting to take a “tutorial” approach to solve this problem and offer students detailed, step-by- step instructions, but this can foster the very kind of passive learning we sought to avoid. We decided to take a less prescriptive approach that focused on supervised exploration, serving as facilitators rather than top- down instructors. Often, students chose tools that we ourselves had not used and saw that we were learning alongside them. We helped them develop the skills they needed independently and intervened to solve problems only when they threatened to become more frustrating than educational. The unconventional History Lab gave students many of the conventional skills that we historians hope to convey. In this sense the lab complemented existing tutorials on historical methods. It showed students how to devise a research project and pursue it independently. It taught them valuable research skills, both digital and analog. The acquisition of skills is obviously difficult to assess. Student satisfaction was, however, very high. As instructors, we both received 4.88 out of 5. Beyond immediate student feedback, the most encouraging result was that some juniors intend to use digital tools for their senior theses. These students admitted that they would not have dared to learn these techniques by themselves but now feel emboldened to incorporate them. Research papers and senior theses allow students to stumble on their own; History Lab uses the collaborative nature of digital scholarship to foster collective rather than individual learning. The organization of the lab can prove challenging within the university infrastructure. While many tools are freely available, some require expensive software licenses. Others need servers to allow students to work on the same dataset simultaneously. Faculty would need to adjust their labs to their university’s willingness to support tools and purchase software licenses. Scalability is also a critical issue. One solution is to think about lab projects in a modular way. Heidi Tworek, now at the University of British Columbia, will include a lab module within a large introductory lecture course. Her exercise maps immigration to Canada from around the world. Each student will research a country and input the data. The class will then create a collective map that brings together the individual contributions to visualize immigration to Canada over time. Students could collaborate on particularly relevant countries, such as China or Great Britain, making the exercise suitable for up to 150 students. Conclusion y using the classroom B to produce living knowledge, History Lab blurs the line between teaching and research. It allows students to engage with the messy process of historical research and digital scholarship. The experience gave students a look behind the scenes at how professional historians actually work, often stumbling through research, reaching dead ends, and figuring out how to resolve them or take the research in new directions. And it made students believe that they can create history too. Gabriel Pizzorno is a lecturer on history at Harvard University. His research and teaching focuses on the history and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East, as well as digital scholarship and methods. Heidi Tworek is assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia. She was previously a lecturer and assistant director of undergraduate studies in the history department at Harvard University. Note 1. On making research integral to teaching, see Nancy Shoemaker, “Where is the History Lab Course?” Perspectives on History (January 2009), www.historians.org/publications- and- directories/perspectives-on- history/january- 2009/where-is-the-history- lab-course. ANNUAL MEETING Meeting Tweeting Insights on Making Connections from #AHA16 Stephanie Kingsley witter is an increasingly T popular way for historians to connect. Whether sharing resources, concocting collaborations, or just trading esoteric jokes, historians stay in touch using the lightning- fast herald of the digital age: the tweet. Bring historians together for four days with a common purpose—and hashtag!—and you have the back channel of the American Historical Association’s annual meeting. During the Atlanta meeting this year, 2,249 users exchanged 13,081 tweets using the #aha16 hashtag. This included live-tweeting sessions, chatting while attending different panels, and even finding opportunities to meet in person at receptions and other events in the course of the meeting. The AHA has actively encouraged tweeting using the meeting hashtag since 2010, and tweeting has become more important to many attendees’ meeting experience. With so much activity—and data—on #aha16 this year, it’s a good time to take a step back and assess what’s working and what isn’t, and ultimately ask: How efficiently are historians using Twitter, and is Twitter helping us become a better-connected scholarly community? The Gephi network visualization (see “Visualizing the #aha16 Network,” next page) shows all the instances that users participated beyond simply tweeting #aha16.This included user mentions, tweets to other hashtags, and retweets. Such tweets comprised approximately 83 percent of all Twitter activity. Not counting retweets, about 68 percent of #aha16 tweets included either another user or hashtag— which means that, in general, historians know their Twitter tools. Still, individual use varies. Twitter users who engage frequently are most likely to be active in the graph’s dense community clusters. The #twitterstorians and #dighist tags define two communities that have learned to engage actively with each other. At the 2016 annual meeting, Twitter activity beyond those main groups grew considerably, but the visualization indicates that many of these communities haven’t coalesced in the same way. To promote conversations in all areas of the history discipline, I’d like to share a few takeaways from a distant reading of our #aha16 Twitter activity. Figure 1. A well-connected community is united by the topical tag #dighist; users tweet the tag and the topical tag #dighist; users tweet the tag and often mention one another.

Figure 2. The most popular session tag: #s161, for “Podcasting History”. For Those Looking to Get More Engaged ◆ Using only #aha16 was insufficient to be discovered in the meeting feed; the hashtag was simply too busy. Use additional session or topical tags to better define where your tweets fit within the larger conversation. ◆ Using topical hashtags, such as #dighist (fig. 1) or #publichistory is a great way to connect with historians who have common interests. And you don’t have to stay in one group! Links crisscrossing the network reveal users strongly connected to one community but equally interested in conversations on other topics. ◆ Standardize the hashtags you and your colleagues use. Historians tweeting about a major topic often didn’t connect because they used different variations of a hashtag. Back in the fall, several digital historians debated (on Twitter, of course!) which to use: #dighist, #dhist, or #digitalhistory. (In case you are curious, they settled on #dighist.) These conversations are valuable. At the 2016 annual meeting, a group of enthusiastic historians tweeted actively from the several panels on revolutions using a plethora of tags: #AgeofRevolutions, #Revolution, #revolutions, #rewritingrevolutions, and #histrevs were all used at one point. None took off. Not having a unified tag can fragment the conversation and make it difficult for new users to find and connect to the community. Better hashtag coordination will help expand Twitter to more communities within our discipline and enrich the conversation. To assist with this endeavor for 2017, I plan on updating the crowdsourced hashtag taxonomy Vanessa Varin produced in 2013. Watch AHA Today (blog.historians.org) for updates. ◆ Many users scatter random hashtags to the wind, represented by the tiny orange nodes. This is a form of Twitter litter—it clutters the conversation and confuses those trying to find that conversation. Be sure to take the time to find the commonly used hashtags. (But if you’re simply being whimsical, go for it! Most historians weren’t likely following #unicorns, #pinkcocktails, or #ahaballers, but they surely gave at least a few of us a chuckle.) ◆ Mix up your Twitter strategy by using a blend of live-tweeting to hashtags, reaching out to colleagues directly through handles, and retweeting to let others know you’re listening. Visualizing the #AHA16 Network he Gephi network T displayed here includes nodes for both users and hashtags for all tweets posted between January 6 and 12. All hashtags are orange, while users are coded according to their behavior.

◆ Green nodes: users who mentioned other users ◆ Blue nodes: users who did not employ user mentions but did use hashtags besides #aha16 ◆ Purple nodes: users who only retweeted Nodes are sized according to input degree—in other words, how often those nodes were referenced by other nodes. Larger nodes, users or hashtags, were referenced the most frequently. Edges are also weighted according to how often a particular user tweeted a specific user or hashtag. (Big, thick lines usually indicate live-tweeting.) Like nodes, edges are also color-coded. ◆ Green edges: tweets with user mentions (may also include hashtags) ◆ Orange edges: tweets with hashtags and no user mentions ◆ Purple edges: retweets Stephanie Kingsley For Live Tweeters ◆ If you’re planning to attend sessions and live- tweet, research the speakers’ handles and relevant topical tags. Tweeting a speaker’s handle is not only a great way to connect, it’s also a courtesy and form of citation. But live- tweeting mentions won’t necessarily broaden your network. Often users mentioned several other users and got no response. (Hillary Clinton and Rihanna both made it to the meeting via mentions by historians, but neither retweeted or responded. Point made—sort of.) ◆ Use session tags to connect with fellow live- tweeters. Of the top 20 most used hashtags, 11 were session- or event- specific. A session hashtag immediately fosters community among those who use it, because they are better able to read tweets by those interested in the same subject and interact with them. Fig. 2 reveals that those tweeting the same session tag often interacted with one another and that those who used session tags tended to interact with people outside the core group more frequently. For Those Following Along ◆ The presence of users who only retweet (indicated by purple nodes) points to an increasingly important aspect of the meeting: many historians unable to attend in person follow the conversation on Twitter. Researching tags and handles will let you know what’s going on and help you decide what to follow. ◆ If you usually follow #twitterstorians or #history, bear in mind that many users at the meeting tweet to other, more specific tags. At the 2016 annual meeting, only about 3.5 percent of users tweeted to #twitterstorians and 1.1 percent to #history. Although this is still a lot of traffic (indeed, #twitterstorians was the top-used hashtag at the meeting) because it unites historians broadly, it is not the best way of connecting with others. Consider using a session or topical tag alongside these more general tags if you decide to use them. ◆ Just because you can’t attend doesn’t mean you shouldn’t join the conversation. Rather than just retweeting someone who’s live- tweeting a panel, shoot them a question or comment! Takeaways This may seem like a lot to keep in mind, but those who engage on Twitter while at the meeting, if only a few times, do encounter others and make connections. Of users who retweeted, mentioned, or used a topical or session hashtag 10 times or more, 86 percent received 10 or more mentions or retweets themselves. And there are a lot of ways to engage on Twitter. Some annual meeting attendees jump in and live-tweet every session they attend, tweeting at their friends throughout; others tweet a few times within a fairly small group. Still others tweet pictures of their hotel interiors—or the AHA signature cocktail they’re enjoying. There is no limit to what you can share about the historical discipline or the meeting environment, but tweeting thoughtfully and strategically can lead to a more interactive experience. It can also make the conversation much more inviting for historians wanting to join. Stephanie Kingsley is the AHA’s associate editor, web content and social media. She tweets @KingsleySteph.

AHA ACTIVITIES “The Future of the African American Past” A Landmark Conference to Mark the Opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Dana L. Schaffer n October 1983, a generation of senior historians gathered at Purdue University under the auspices of the AHA to share Iwhat they had learned about the African American past and to establish what issues still needed to be explored. The conference and the resulting publication (The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future, 1986) became milestones—they provided not only a classic assessment of the field at the time, but also helpful guides for moving forward. Now, 33 years later, we stand at a different moment in the historical field. A new generation of historians is bringing fresh insights to long-standing questions and answering others that were only dimly imagined in the 1980s. TNoa mtioanrakl Mthuisse mumo mof eAnfrtic aannd American History and the forthcoming opening A slave cabin from the early 1800s at Point of Pines A slave cabin from the early 1800s at Point of Pines oPfla ntatiotnh eo n EdisStmo Iistlhansodn inia Snouth Carolina. National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) later this fall, the AHA and the NMAAHC are organizing another historic conference, “The Future of the African American Past.” Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities with additional support from HISTORY, the conference will take place May 19–21, 2016, and will be the first major public event held in the new museum. Although the NMAAHC will be the first national museum devoted specifically to African American history (and the last to be built on the National Mall in Washington, DC), the integration of African American history into our understanding of the nation’s past has enabled Lonnie Bunch, the director of the NMAAHC, to speak authoritatively of the museum as telling “America’s story.” Public and scholarly engagement with the African and African American struggle against slavery and the achievement of freedom has deepened over the past generation. The narratives of slavery, emancipation, and the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the themes of oppression, struggle, and liberation, still resonate deeply and command considerable attention from historians. Indeed, Americans and others around the world turn to the histories and cultures of the African diaspora for inspiration. Conference Preview Session Available Online ee the conference S preview session held at the AHA’s 2016 annual meeting in Atlanta, on the AHA’s YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch? v=86gNTOaJJrQ. The session featured Thomas C. Holt (Univ. of Chicago), David W. Blight (Yale Univ.), Rex Ellis (NMAAHC), Johnnetta B. Cole (Smithsonian National Museum of African Art), and Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard Univ.). But the context for these interests has changed. We are at a different time for the public as well as for research historians. This conference occurs not only on the occasion of anniversaries of significant events—the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the ending of the Civil War, the enacting of the Voting Rights Act, to name a few —but also in the midst of a time when students on college campuses across the country are demanding that we reexamine how the black experience is taught, studied, written about, and portrayed in the public realm. As historian Tom Holt reminded us during his session introduction at the 2016 AHA annual meeting in Atlanta, “[We are] in a crisis-induced national moment of reflection on the past, present, and future of efforts to understand black Americans’ historical experience and how that history might inform our present.” So what comes next in the popular understanding of African American history and its relation to American history, as clearly both have changed dramatically? What issues are the next generation’s historians likely to explore? What themes are most likely to engage the millions of visitors to the museum in the next 35 years? The conference’s goal is to generate a conversation that at once describes the complex landscape that has evolved over the past three decades and that maps new directions. This conference and the occasion of the museum opening provide an opportunity for historians to share research and ideas, take stock of recent trends, and set an agenda to guide future inquiry. We intend to do this in a way that captures the imagination of public audiences as well as the interest of historians. To reaNcaht iobnoatl hM uasueduime nocf es, conAfefrriecannc eA meseriscsaino nHsis tohryave been organizedan di nCtuolt urneine Rosa Parks’s dress from mo1d9e5r5a.ted panels of oral presentations limited to 10 minutes each. Session chairs will actively moderate the conversations, facilitating discussion among the panelists and directing questions from the audience. Papers will be posted on a gated section of the conference website in advance, enabling more informed conversations among invited participants and registered attendees. To encourage further public conversation, each morning we will post on the conference website two blog pieces per session, summarizing the discussions of the previous day. The conference will begin on Thursday evening, May 19, with an opening roundt​ able, “The Long Struggle for Civil Rights and Black Freedom,” featuring veterans of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and today. Panelists will reflect on African American political activism in the last half century, putting recent struggles in the broader context of black people’s long demand for equality, which began in the holds of slave ships and survived the nadir of segregation and disenfranchisement. Become a Student-Travel Sponsor ant to ensure that Wstudent historians are a part of this event? The AHA invites universities to become event sponsors by committing to send at least two graduate students to the conference at the institution’s expense. Participating institutions will be listed on the conference website. Interested departments should contact Dana Schaffer at [email protected] or (202) 450-4827. What issues are the next generation’s historians likely to explore? What themes are most likely to engage the millions of visitors to the museum in the next 35 years? Continuing throughout the weekend, the conference will also feature sessions titled “Who Is Black America?”; “Slavery and Freedom”; “Race, Power, and Urban Spaces”; “Capitalism and the Making and Unmaking of Black America”; “What Is African American Religion?”; “Historic Preservation and Public Reckoning”; and “Internationalization of African American Politics and Culture.” The conference concludes on Saturday afternoon with the session “African American History as American History,” at which panelists will examine how historians might explore the texture of American history through the experiences of people of African descent while addressing the changing demands and interests of public culture. For morGe inai Wnfhoitremmaatnion aboTuhte the Wacoshninfegrteonce, incMluodniunmge an t fulla sncdh edtuhlee, a National Museum of listA froicfa n pAamrteircicipana nHtiss,t oryand regaisntdra tiConul tudree taiolns, pthlease visiNtational Mall in Washington, DC. www.futureafamhistory.si.edu Registration is free, and attendees are encouraged to register in advance. The conference will be live- streamed on the website. Dana L. Schaffer is deputy director of the AHA. AHA ACTIVITIES In the April Issue of the American Historical Review Alex Lichtenstein he April issue of the includes five full- length articles, Tranging from the 16th- century Atlantic world to late socialist East Berlin. The issue also contains five featured reviews and our regular book review section. The issue opens with a methodological essay by Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” Putnam considers the often- unrecognized consequences of the transnational and digital turns on historians’ research practices. Increasing digitization of primary and secondary sources, as well as dramatic improvements in searchability and access, have radically changed historians’ approach to research. More specifically, digitization has reduced the role of deep local knowledge and archival digging as a prerequisite to discovery. Indeed, using the power of keyword searches, we can now find information without ever visiting a physical archive. Yet this shift in the digitization and availability of sources has inspired remarkably little reflection about its impacts on individual projects or collective trends. For example, what are its implications for research into the supranational past? How does digital access to sources relate to the current boom in transnational topics and approaches? This essay chronicles the new kinds of scholarship made possible by technological transformations. At the same time, it recalls the benefits of conducting research in an analog world involving physical border crossings. As Putnam asks, what are the intellectual and political costs of accessing sources digitally? Four traditional empirical articles follow Putnam’s methodological essay. In “Sugar Machines: Picturing Industrialized Slavery,” John E. Crowley shows how throughout the Atlantic world, from the mid-16th to the mid-19th century, visual representations of sugar plantations favored machinery over enslaved workforces. European artists presented the production of sugar as technologically progressive and simultaneously minimized its crucial conjunction with slave labor. The sugar mill, with its vertical three-roller mills and trains of evaporative vats, became a synecdoche of the most intensive and expansive industry in the early modern world. Crowley argues that a major historiographic debate—whether the dependence on slave labor made the production of sugar economically regressive—has simply ignored the abundant visual evidence on the issue. As a humanitarian abolitionist movement mobilized in late 18th- century Britain, its images emphasized the abuse of slaves as individuals but overlooked the plantation setting. In contrast, artistic clients of anti-abolitionist patrons responded with picturesque landscapes showing slave plantations as tranquil manorial communities with intensive productive technology. Similarly, planters in mid-19th- century Cuba visually advertised their global economic aspirations with hypertechnological images of factories requiring only minuscule inputs of enslaved labor. The visual showcasing of sugar’s technology suggests how easily Europeans could be distracted from concerns about the millions of enslaved people in their colonies. The next article shifts attention from the Atlantic world to Eurasia, conjoining microhistory and global history. In “Maidservants’ Tales: Narrating Domestic and Global History in Eurasia, 1600–1900,” Amy Stanley recounts the story of a 19th-century Japanese maidservant in local and global registers. The maidservant, Tsuneno, is not an obvious protagonist for a global history—she never manufactured a product for export, conversed with a foreign person, wore imported cloth, or traveled beyond the shogun’s realm. Yet Stanley contends that her experience of urban migration, service work, and marriage resembled those of other women across Eurasia in the years between 1600 and 1900. Situating Tsuneno’s mundane story in both local and global frames, Stanley challenges microhistorical approaches by considering how questions of agency might be answered with reference to transnational and long- term trends as well as close attention to intimate contexts. In many ways, this article suggests that the digital approach to transnational scholarship described by Putnam in her article can, in fact, be pursued through more old- fashioned research strategies. Stanley also shows how attention to overlooked historical actors challenges the periodization and spatial imagination of global history. Collectively, maidservants’ tales do not show us a world divided between “Europe” and “Asia,” or a sudden break that occurred with the Industrial Revolution, but rather a continuous “early modern” era that converged across Eurasia and lasted well into the 19th century. Céline Carayon's “The Gesture-Speech of Mankind” returns us to the Western Hemisphere. In this article, Carayon brings together two distinct moments of encounter between Western and indigenous practices of sign language in an effort to disentangle faulty interpretive assumptions and to reveal new, better- historicized connections. Starting in the late 15th century, European explorers and settlers across the Americas came into contact with indigenous modes of nonverbal communication. This first encounter between the sign systems of Europe and America was less defined by misunderstandings than has previously been suggested, and can fruitfully be connected with the later “rediscovery” of western Plains Indians’ sign languages by ethnologists starting in the late 1890s. Carayon argues that these scholars’ investigations have had a misleading effect on our understanding of both Indian and Western sign systems, by initiating assumptions about their origins in speech incapacity and their resemblance to the sign language of deaf communities. Neither of these, Carayon argues, were presuppositions during earlier encounters, when sign languages were more accurately conceptualized in conjunction with rhetoric and eloquence. By undermining this paradigm, she shows that the Western intellectual history of sign language was significantly shaped by encounters with American indigenous nonverbal systems. By bridging temporal and disciplinary boundaries, and by integrating Atlantic, global, and longue durée lines of inquiry, this article helps reframe traditional debates about the colonial “clash of cultures,” orality and literacy, and cultural/linguistic misunderstandings in early America. his glass-tile mosaic T was completed shortly before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. At the time of its construction, it would have been one of the brightest parts of Marzahn’s landscape, in contrast to the drabness of the surrounding high- rises. After the wall fell, one of the first things that East Germans did across the former country was to paint their apartment buildings in bright colors, and today many of Marzahn’s buildings match the vibrant colors of the mosaic. In “Mass Housing, Late Modernism, and the Forging of Community in New York City and East Berlin, 1965–1989,” Annemarie Sammartino explores the flexibility of urban modernism through a comparison of Marzahn and Co-op City, a mass housing complex in New York City. Work for the Happiness of Humanity. Mosaic by East German artist Walter Womacka at the Marzahn housing development in Berlin. Detail from 2011 photo “Walter-Womacka- Mosaiken in Berlin- Marzahn,” from the validd Flickr album “Berlin.” CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Joint Virtual Issue of the American Historical Review and Past & Present Afree issue on “slavery and anti-slavery in the Atlantic world” is now available at http://bit.ly/1mM1AVh. The issue carries an introduction from Rob Schneider (AHR) and Matthew Hilton (P&P) on the evolution of the field as reflected in the pages of the two journals. For a limited time, all articles in the issue are available for free download. The April issue’s final article, by Annem​ arie Sammartino, is “Mass Housing, Late Modernism, and the Forging of Community in New York City and East Berlin, 1965–1989.” Sammartino offers a detailed comparison of the histories of Co-op City in New York City and Marzahn in Berlin—mass housing projects constructed in the late 1960s and late 1970s, respectively. Her article explores the intentions of urban planners and the experiences of the communities’ residents in these two very different societies. She challenges the standard narrative of urban modernism, which considers its demise to be linked to the growth of new urbanist critiques of the 1960s. Instead, Sammartino argues that both capitalist and socialist models of urban modernism proved flexible enough to respond to this challenge with developments like Co-op City and Marzahn. Both projects, she maintains, were more thoughtful about the nature and meaning of urban community than their modernist predecessors in the immediate postwar period. Sammartino concludes that late modernist ideas about urban community could, in fact, offer an antidote to American-style consumerism and imagine new modes of urban social interaction and living. This approach to urban modernism, she suggests, provided a connective thread across the Iron Curtain in the middle decades of the Cold War. Finally, the April issue introduces a new feature, “Digital Primary Sources,” designed to provide a useful tool for navigating the enormous universe of digitized material and “born digital” sources of interest to historians. This section, found in the journal’s back pages, serves as a preliminary guide to selected online collections of primary sources. Over time, a comprehensive online listing compiled jointly by the AHA and Indiana University, and built from the recommendations of our editors, staff, and readers, will be made available. Check historians.org/digital- primary-sources for updates. Alex Lichtenstein is associate professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington and interim editor of the American Historical Review. AHA ACTIVITIES 2016 AHA Nominations Compiled by Liz Townsend he Nominating Committee for 2016–17, chaired by François Furstenberg (Johns Hopkins Univ.), met in Washington, DC, Ton February 19 and 20 and offers the following candidates for offices of the Association that are to be filled in the election this year. President (1-year term) Tyler E. Stovall, University of California, Santa Cruz (modern France, African Americans in Europe, transnational history) President-elect (1- year term) David W. Blight, Yale University (Civil War memory, Frederick Douglass) Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University (early Anglo-American gender and politics) Vice President, Professional Division (3-year term) Kevin Boyle, Northwestern University (20th-century US) Eric Hinderaker, University of Utah (politics of memory, comparative colonization) Council/Divisions (3-year terms) Councilor, Profession Suzanne L. Marchand, Louisiana State University (German theology/philology/history, 19th-century art and archaeology) Muriel C. McClendon, University of California, Los Angeles (early modern Britain) Councilor, Research Becky M. Nicolaides, independent scholar (history of American suburbs) Abby Smith Rumsey, independent scholar (history of ideas, media, and information technologies) Councilor, Teaching Carlos A. Contreras, Grossmont College (Mexico, US–Latin American relations) Sarah E. Shurts, Bergen Community College (modern French intellectual identity construction, development of French extreme right) Committee on Committees (3- year term) Ariel de la Fuente, Purdue University (Latin America) Kaya Şahin, Indiana University (early modern Ottoman history) Nominating Committee (3-year terms) Slot 1 Adam J. Davis, Denison University (medieval church, ecclesiastical reform, history of charity) Susannah R. Ottaway, Carleton College (British social, European family) Slot 2 Purnima Dhavan, University of Washington (Mughal literary cultures, early modern information networks) Elizabeth S. Schmidt, Loyola University Maryland (Cold War and decolonization, gender, and nationalism in Africa) Slot 3 Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University (comparative colonial, legal) Laurent Dubois, Duke University (Haitian revolution, Afro-Atlantic religion and cultural, Caribbean) Nominations may also be made by petition; each petition must carry the signatures of 100 or more members of the Association in good standing and indicate the particular vacancy for which the nomination is intended. Nominations by petition must be in the hands of the Nominating Committee on or before May 1, and should be sent to the AHA office at 400 A St. SE, Washington, DC 20003. All nominations must be accompanied by certification of willingness of the nominee to serve if elected. In distributing the annual ballot to the members of the Association, the Nominating Committee shall present and identify such candidates nominated by petition along with its own candidates. Balloting will begin June 1.

IN MEMORIAM Elizabeth Eisenstein 1923– 2016 Historian of the book and early modern Europe; AHA member since 1949 lizabeth (Betty) Eisenstein, 92, died at her home in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2016, after a short Eillness. She is best known for her two-v​ olume work The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), which broke new ground by analyzing the interaction between the introduction of movable type in the mid-15th century and three major early modern movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. Eisenstein was born in New York City to Sam A. Lewisohn and Margaret Seligman Lewisohn. The family lived with her grandfather, Adolph Lewisohn, an industrialist and philanthropist, until his death in 1938. Her mother, who was active in the progressive education- reform movement and was a strong proponent of women’s education, encouraged her daughters to attend college. Following her graduation from Vassar College, where she was mentored by its outstanding faculty (including Evalyn Clark, J. B. Ross, and Mildred Campbell), she enrolled in the graduate program at Harvard University, where she began a lifetime friendship with her adviser, the historian Crane Brinton, and his wife, Ceci, a psychologist. She joined the AHA in 1949 and would serve on the AHA Council from 1981 to 1984. After marrying a fellow Harvard graduate student, physicist Julian Eisenstein, in 1948, she accompanied him to Madison, Wisconsin; Oxford; and State College, Pennsylvania, at what is now Penn State University. Raised in a mansion on Fifth Avenue and trained as a scholar, Betty Eisenstein was unprepared for the sexism she encountered in postwar academe and found her new role as a faculty wife and young mother in the 1950s alternately puzzling and frustrating. She was pleased when her husband found a job in Washington, DC, which offered more opportunities. Her first publication seems to have been a book review in the American Historical Review in 1958. In 1959, she became a part-time lecturer at American University and published her first book, The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti (1761–1837). Her part- time position lacked prestige, but it encouraged her to consider bigger historical questions than she might otherwise have tackled and allowed her to spend more time on her own research. She later refused offers of a full-time post from American. EisensteinJ oahtnt rCib. uDteeLda cyher competitEivleiznaebsse thto her positionE aiss etnhset etihnird in a family of four girls. It put her in good stead as she built a career in a profession that often condescended to female scholars. Her first significant article, “Who Intervened in 1788? A Commentary on The Coming of the French Revolution,” published in the AHR in 1965, offered a stinging critique of George Lefebvre’s respected book. It drew two rebuttals in the next volume, capped by her no-holds-barred riposte claiming one of the authors had “blundered too often in posing his objections to make possible a fruitful debate.” Google Scholar lists over 400 citations to the original article. The first footnote to “Who Intervened” noted work in progress on the “impact of printing on Western European society and thought.” It was followed by a trio of articles exploring the topic: “Clio and Chronos: An Essay on the Making and Breaking of History-Book Time,” in History and Theory (1966); “Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing . . . ,” in the Journal of Modern History (1968); and “The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance,” in Past and Present (1969). In the third very long article is this pithy claim: “My thesis . . . is that the advent of printing was, quite literally, an epoch-making event. The shift from script to print revolutionized Western culture.” One of the tragedies of Eisenstein’s life was the death of her son John Calvert Eisenstein in 1974, when he was just 21. When the University of Michigan offered her the Alice Freeman Palmer Chair of History in 1975, she accepted, perhaps in part to put this behind her. From then until her resignation in 1988, she commuted weekly by air from Washington to Michigan. Eisenstein’s magnum opus, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, appeared in two hefty volumes in 1979 and became an instant, if controversial, success. Reviews appeared in more than 80 publications. It was reprinted the following year, and an abridged version, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, appeared in 1983. Since then it has appeared in several different languages. It is still cited as the seminal work in the cultural history of the book. Eisenstein continued to be active in retirement. Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution (1992) combined her interests in print culture and 18th-century French intellectual history. Her final book, Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending, took the story into the Internet age but concluded that “Western attitudes that have survived over millennia are likely to persist. . . . Premature obituaries on the end of the book and the death of print are themselves testimony to long-enduring habits of mind.” Under the name Betty Eisenstein, she was also a nationally ranked senior women’s tennis player, winning 33 national championships, three Grand Slam championships, and, in 1988, a World Championship. In 1999 she was inducted into the Mid-A​ tlantic Tennis Hall of Fame. She continued playing almost up to the time of her death. Eisenstein received many awards, which she thoroughly relished. She returned several times to Vassar to give eulogies and lectures. She also held fellowships and visiting lectureships in the United States, Israel, Europe, and Australia. Her professional honors included an Award for Scholarly Distinction from the AHA in 2003; an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, University of Michigan, 2004; and the Gutenberg Award of the Gutenberg Society, Mainz, 2012. Among the most meaningful was Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (2007), which included essays by her friends and students and an interview. Eisenstein’s work opened up new ways to explore the transitions that shaped early modern thought; her analysis of the relationship between communication and culture remains relevant in the Internet era, more than three decades after her book first appeared. Donations in Eisenstein’s name may be made to the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Acquisition Fund. Margaret Eisenstein DeLacyPortland, Oregon

CAREER PATHS Casting a Wider Net History PhDs, Change Your Perspective! Ramona Houston f you have earned or are currently pursuing a PhD in history and think being a college Iprofessor is the only career option for you, you have been hoodwinked!—totally misinformed, misguided, and misled. Despite the pervading ignorance about the numerous career paths for history PhDs, there is hope for the nonconformists—the intellectual explorers and the academic conquistadors. Embrace this: no matter where you are in your career, now is the time for you to recognize, believe in, and realize your exceptional abilities, immense value, and infinite potential. Everything changes once you change your perspective. There are myriad career paths that you can pursue empowered with a PhD in history. Just look at the prosperous careers of W.E.B. DuBois, Peter Weller, Robert Gates, Marian Frances Berry, and others who earned this degree. If they had chosen only to be college professors, where would our country and world, as well as our political, civic, and cultural institutions be? According to the 2010 US Census, only 1 percent of Americans have a PhD, and even fewer have a PhD in history. You are or will be a member of an elite group. So why limit your infinite personal potential to one narrow career path? Why see other professional opportunities as “something to fall back on”? Simply put, broaden your perspective to expand your scope of possibilities. You cannot sail the relatively uncharted historical seas and discover the New World of professional possibilities by continuing to believe the world is flat. How are historians valuable outside the academy? Let me list the ways. (And, might I acknowledge, there are many more!) As individuals with a PhD in history, we have cultivated a range of skills during our education. We possess exceptional reading and writing skills. (No need to expand on this point.) Our critical thinking skills are top-notch. We know how to evaluate and analyze information. We have the keen ability to understand ideas, issues, challenges, and relationships in their complexity. We recognize that none of these has one perspective, one cause, or one solution. Courtesy of Ramona Houston WRea kmnoonwa H hoouwsto tno conduct comprehensive research. We know how to find, collect, organize, and analyze information from a variety of sources. Furthermore, we know how to take that information and synthesize it in a way that makes sense. We are effective in communication and persuasion. As historians, we know how to explain ideas clearly and concisely. We also know how to make a case and substantiate it with compelling evidence. We possess intellectual curiosity, which inspires us to understand issues in their historical context. We ask critical questions that lead us to the hows and whys of a situation. We have the strong inclination to examine the reasons beneath an issue. We are effective problem solvers. Because we evaluate the facts and perspectives on all sides of an issue, we know how to address complex challenges. We know that solutions evolve when we acknowledge and address the various components of an issue. We are meticulous record keepers. We understand the importance of documentation and preserving records. We value the written word. We are wordsmiths. We understand that words have power and that words matter, and we use them skillfully. We are independent and self-disciplined workers. There is no need to micromanage us! We know how to manage a project and get the job done. We are excellent strategists. Because we understand that a decision may have multiple impacts, we consider and evaluate all options. We are shrewd and tactical in our efforts to develop a plan of action to reach a goal. Tell me, what sector does not need individuals with these skills? As a historian, you have a number of marketa​ ble skills and abilities that can complement, develop, and enhance any sector or work environment. Government, corporations, nonprofits— your career options are wider than you think! In fact, I wholeheartedly believe that because of our strengths, individuals with a PhD in history need to be present in every sector of our society. From the beginning of my educational career, I have never held the sole ambition of becoming only a college professor—I earned credentials so that I could sit at any table that I desired. I did, however, become a college professor at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, one of the country’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Although I cherished the institution, enjoyed teaching, maintained great relationships with my colleagues, and absolutely loved my students, I was not totally fulfilled by teaching. Additionally, I did not believe that being a college professor engaged all of my interests, skills, and abilities, nor did it maximize my reach and impact. I wanted more for my professional career and life. On a spiritual level, living a fulfilling, prosperous, and abundant life is a personal responsibility and journey. No one but you has the power to make you happy; therefore, you must embrace your power and make decisions that will create your ideal life. You must chart your own course, one designed by you and for you. From the beginning of my educational career, I have never held the sole ambition of becoming only a college professor. I earned credentials so that I could sit at any table that I desired. Personally, I believe that many people are unhappy and unfulfilled because they have chosen the path of least resistance—they fish where everyone else has told them to fish. The result: they end up doing work or working in environments that they do not enjoy. Oh ye historians, if you are not catching any fish, if the fish you are catching do not satisfy you, or if you are adventurous and want to catch different species of fish, cast your net in a different place! I have several pieces of advice for historians who want to cast their professional net beyond the professoriate. First, conduct a personal assessment to determine your interests, skills, and expertise, keeping in mind that working in your gift is the key to a fulfilling, enjoyable, and prosperous career. From there, determine the career options that may be a good fit for your unique abilities. As you explore, identify places and spaces that need your expertise, always confidently knowing that you have a solution to someone else’s problem. Lastly, identify advocates and supporters who will put you in front of the right people and in the right places. Mentors and sponsors have the power to help you achieve your professional goals by advancing your career. As for the entrepreneurs, you must do all of the above and more. Entrepreneurship requires you to develop an entirely new set of skills—those that are required of all successful businessmen and women. Although making the transition from being an academician or employee to being an entrepreneur can be challenging, it can also be gratifying. If you feel that entrepreneurship is for you, go for it! In my professional journey, I have learned to stand with confidence among my colleagues, knowing that it is my decision to work outside of the academy and recognizing that my many years of study were a not a futile intellectual exercise. More importantly, I choose to define myself rather than be defined by others. I fully recognize that my education has shaped and enhanced who I am. I bring more to the table professionally because of the skills that I developed earning my PhD. I know that I am a valuable asset to any environment. Historians, you must realize that creating your ideal career and life is an evolutionary process. You have to keep exploring, moving forward, and making adjustments until you discover your land of milk and honey. No one can define and determine that place and space but you. Having worked in several sectors and capacities, including as an entrepreneur, I have finally ascertained that I enjoy working in a job and I enjoy being an entrepreneur. Currently, I am establishing a career that provides me the best of both worlds, creating a professional sphere that incorporates all of my interests, skills, and expertise as a scholar, educator, and community engagement strategist. Historians, broaden your vision. You cannot see the vast, fascinating professional horizon before you by looking through the limited view of a spyglass. Once you change your perspective, you will discover that an immense number of unexplored lands and unchartered territories are just waiting for you. With a new outlook, a clear understanding of your valuable skills and abilities, and a personal commitment to create a professional career and life that truly make you happy, you are hereby “permissioned” and commissioned to travel beyond the professoriate. Historians, go forth! Explore, impact, and transform the professional frontier with your undeniable talent and ability. Our communities, our country, and our world need us! A native of Brownwood, Texas, Ramona Houston, PhD, PMP, has a multifaceted career as a scholar, educator, and community engagement strategist who designs, manages, and executes projects, programs, and events that seek to make a social impact. She is a product of Clark Atlanta University, an HBCU in Atlanta, and The University of Texas at Austin. Currently she resides in Atlanta with her husband, Terreon Gully, and their princess, Chase, an 11-year- old Pomeranian. To contact or learn more about Ramona, visit www.ramonahouston.com.

AHA CAREER CENTER Positions are listed alphabetically: first by country, then state/province, city, institution, and academic field. Find more job ads at careers.historians.org. New Haven Yale University Senior Appointment/Modern Europe. The Yale University Department of History intends to make a senior appointment in modern European history since 1800, in any field or region excluding Russia, beginning July 1, 2017. Applications are welcome from scholars at the level of advanced associate or full professor who have demonstrated exceptional scholarship and teaching as well as leadership in their field and the profession. Yale University is an AA/EOE. Yale values diversity among its students, staff, and faculty and strongly welcomes applications from women, persons with disabilities, protected veterans, and underrepresented minorities. All applicants should submit a letter of application, CV, and statement of research and teaching interests to Denise Scott at [email protected]. Letters of reference are not required at this initial stage. The review of applications will begin March 31, 2016, and continue until a suitable candidate is found.

Salem Willamette University Visiting Assistant Professor/Transnational. The Department of History at Willamette University seeks a transnational historian with an area of focus in Latin America, the Middle East/North Africa, or Pacific Rim/Pacific Indigenous Studies for a one year, non- tenure-track visiting appointment beginning in the fall of 2016. This position is eligible for medical and dental benefits. The teaching load is three courses per semester with two at the lower-division level and one at the upper division. Rank and Appointment: Visiting Assistant Professor (PhD) or Visiting Instructor (ABD). Salary with PhD is $42,874; without a PhD $38,587. Candidates holding a PhD or ABD in History will be considered. Teaching experience at the undergraduate level is preferred. Scholars whose work utilizes public history, new media, and digital humanities are encouraged to apply. To review complete job announcement, application material required, and to apply online please visit http://jobs.willamette.edu/postings/1901 Review of applications will begin March 9, 2016, and continue until the finalists are selected. Inquiries should be directed to Prof. William Smaldone, Search Committee Chair, Department of History, at [email protected]. Willamette University is a small, distinguished undergraduate institution with a strong liberal arts curriculum, committed to excellence in teaching and scholarship. For more information about the Department of History, please visit http://www.willamette.edu/cla/history To learn more about Willamette University, please visit http://www.willamette.edu. This position is not eligible for any Visa or employment sponsorship. Believing that diversity contributes to academic excellence and to rich and rewarding communities, Willamette University is committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty, staff and student body. We seek candidates, particularly those from historically under- represented groups, whose work furthers diversity and who bring to campus varied experiences, perspectives and backgrounds. Ad Policy Statement Job discrimination is illegal, and open hiring on the basis of merit depends on fair practice in recruitment, thereby ensuring that all professionally qualified persons may obtain appropriate opportunities. The AHA will not accept a job listing that (1) contains wording that either directly or indirectly links sex, race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, ideology, political affiliation, age, disability, or marital status to a specific job offer; or (2) contains wording requiring applicants to submit special materials for the sole purpose of identifying the applicant’s sex, race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, ideology, political affiliation, veteran status, age, disability, or marital status. The AHA does make an exception to these criteria in three unique cases: (1) open listings for minority vita banks that are clearly not linked with specific jobs, fields, or specializations; (2) ads that require religious identification or affiliation for consideration for the position, a preference that is allowed to religious institutions under federal law; and (3) fellowship advertisements. The AHA retains the right to refuse or edit all discriminatory statements from copy submitted to the Association that is not consistent with these guidelines or with the principles of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The AHA accepts advertisements from academic institutions whose administrations are under censure by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), but requires that this fact be clearly stated. Refer to www.aaup.org/our- programs/academic- freedom/censure-list for more information. For further details on best practices in hiring and academic employment, see the AHA’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, www.historians.org/standards Guidelines for the Hiring Process, www.historians.org/hiring; and Policy on Advertisements, www.historians.org/adpolicy