American Historical Association ANNUAL REPORT· 1981 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION PRESS City of Washington For sale by the Superintendent of Documents U.S. Government Printing Office Washington, D.C. 20402 Contents Letters of Submittal and Transmittal ....................... v Act of Incorporation . .. vii Presidential Address .................................. 1 Background .......................................... 35 Constitution and Bylaws ............................... 39 Officers, Council, Nominating Committee, Committee on Committees, and Board of Trustees for 1982 ............. 51 Officer's Reports Vice Presidents: Professional Division 53 Research Division ................................. 59 Teaching Division ................................. 63 Executive Director .................................. 71 Editor ............................................ 87 Controller ......................................... 89 Membership Statistics .................................. 107 Minutes of the Council Meeting ......................... 121 Minutes of the Ninety-sixth Business Meeting .............. 133 Committee Reports .................................... 137 Prizes and Awards .................................... 155 Report of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association ........................................ 159 Report of the Program Chair ............................ 165 Program of the Ninety-sixth Annual Meeting ............... 171 Letters of Submittal and 1ransmittal June 15, 1982 To the Congress of the United States: In accordance with the act of incorporation of the American Historical Association, approved January 4, 1889, I have the honor of submitting to Congress the Annual Report of the Association for the year 1981. Respectfully, S. Dillon Ripley, Secretary SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION WASHINGTON, D.C. June 15, 1982 To the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution: As provided by law, I submit to you herewith the report of the Ameri­ can Historical Association, comprising the proceedings of the Associa­ tion and the report of its Pacific Coast Branch for 1981. This volume constitutes the Association's report on the condition of historical study in the United States. Samuel R. Gammon, Executive Director AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION WASHINGTON, D.C. Act of Incorporation Be it enacted by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Andrew D. White, of Ithaca, in the State of New York; George Bancroft, of Wash­ ington, in the District of Columbia; Justin Winsor, of Cambridge, in the State of Massachusetts; William F. Poole, of Chicago, in the State of lllinois; Herbert B. Adams, of Baltimore, in the State of Maryland; Clarence W. Bowen, of Brooklyn, in the State of New York, their associates and successors, are hereby created, in the District of Colum­ bia, a body corporate and politic by the name of the American Histor­ ical Association, for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical manuscripts, and for kindred purposes in the interest of American history, and of history in America. Said Asso­ ciation is authorized to hold real and personal estate in the District of Columbia as far as may be necessary to its lawful ends, to adopt a constitution, and make bylaws not inconsistent with law. Said Associa­ tion shall have its principal office at Washington, in the District of Columbia, and may hold its annual meetings in such places as the said incorporators shall determine. Said Association shall report annually to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, concerning its proceed­ ings and the condition of historical study in America. Said Secretary shall communicate to Congress the whole of such report, or such por­ tions thereof as he shall see fit. The Regents of the Smithsonian In­ stitution are authorized to permit said Association to deposit its collec­ tions, manuscripts, books, pamphlets, and other material for history in the Smithsonian Institution or in the National Museum, at their discre­ tion, upon such conditions and under such rules as they shall pre­ scribe. The real property situated in Square 817, in the city of Washington, District of Columbia, described as lot 23, owned, occupied, and used by the American Historical Association, is exempt from all taxation so long as the same is so owned and occupied, and not used for commer­ cial purposes, subject to the provisions of sections 2, 3, and 5 of the Act entitled, "An Act to define the real property exempt from taxation in the District of Columbia," approved December 24, 1942. [Approved, January 4, 1889, and amended July 3, 1957.] PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS The Challenge of Modern Historiograp\ty BERNARD BAILYN GORDON WRIGHT, speaking from this rostrum a few years ago, warned that those who have the honor of perpetuating the association's ritual of presidential addresses "might do well not to take their pronouncements as the voice of God or the crystallized wisdom of the ages," and he wondered if it were not significant that the president is allowed only one parting shot to speak ex cathedra, "not at the outset of his term of office but at the very end, only forty-eight hours before he 'passes into history,' as the saying goes. By that time it is much too late for him to make promises, to influence the association's future course, or even to be held to answer for his stewardship or for such sophistries as his swan song may contain." Having thus taken the curse off any ex ca­ thedra pronouncements that might follow, Professor Wright proceeded to pronounce on one of the most elevated, difficult, and controversial issues that faces historians who think about what they do-namely, the degree to which history is a moral science. I I admire his courage, but I take my lead from his warning. What follows is nothing more than a general consideration of certain problems of modern historiography encountered by a working historian-a historian, as it happens, just emerging from a considerable period of research and planning for a large-scale project. This project is an effort to describe as a single story the recruitment, settlement patterns, and developing character of the American population in the preindustrial era. It covers a long peri­ od of time-the two hundred years from the early seventeenth century * Reprinted by permission American Historical Review 1982. All rights reserved. I Wright, "History as a Moral Science," AHR, 81 (1976): I. AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIIfI'ION to the advent of industrialism. Further, it involves population move­ ments over a vast geographical area-an area stretching from the bleak island of Foula off the west coast of the Shetlands at the latitude of Greenland to the Lunda Kingdom deep in equatorial Africa, from the Baltic port of Flensburg and from Garlitz on the German-Polish border to Natchez and Pensacola. And, finally, the problems it involves lead naturally beyond history itself to other disciplines as they relate to history: anthropology, demography, and, particularly, cultural geogra­ phy. Yet, despite the breadth of this project, I am painfully aware that any general statements I make about contemporary historiography and its problems as a whole are severely limited by my knowledge, by my primary emphasis on Anglo-American history of the early modem pe­ riod, and by the kinds of studies I happen to have made in the past and am engaged in now. My emphasis on the early modem period of North American and Western European history does, however, have an advantage. In recent years this transitional period between our distant and our immediate past has enjoyed an extraordinary growth in scholarship. This segment of historiography has simply exploded since World War II, and, in­ stead of subsiding after great tumultuous blasts, the explosions con­ tinue. Books and articles on the three hundred years after the European discovery of America drop from the presses in heaps, and essays of general interpretation multiply endlessly. The topics of current interest cannot easily be catalogued. Anyone interested in the whole range of innovative scholarship in the early modern history of the Western world is involved in the latest refinements in the study of the discov­ eries and explorations, in parish records of France and England, in family, community, and demographic studies from everywhere from Uppsala to Florence, in the evolution of royal courts, state offices, and parliamentary bodies, in mobility patterns and migrations, in the everyday lives of workers and witches, in race conflicts, social stratifi­ cation, the uses of leisure, sex practices, burial customs, magic, men­ talites and ideologies of all kinds, and attitudes to everything: to birth, to life, to work, to age, to death, and to life after death. Only a besot­ ted Faust would attempt to keep up with even a large part of this proliferating literature in any detail. What is happening in this area of contemporary historiography is distinctive, I believe, in its magnitude, variety, and speed of growth; but in lesser degrees the same thing is happening elsewhere. Modem historiography in general seems to be in a stage of enormous elabora­ tion. Historical inquiries are ramifying in a hundred directions at once, PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS and there is no coordination among them. Even if one reduces the mass of new writings in the early modem period to the American field, and still further to the publications of card-carrying historians, the sheer amount of the writing now available