August 2003 Newsletter

The Legacy of “Dark Prince”: Some Lessons Learned from Putting Together a Session for the American Historical Association Annual Meeting

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes

At the 2003 American Historical Association meeting I was part of a session on U.S. foreign policy in the 1960s entitled “Dark Prince: Lyndon Johnson and World Affairs.” Although there have been other AHA sessions on foreign policy, our gathering was a statistical rarity. Those that pay attention to the AHA conference program know that the association devotes little attention to topics like diplomatic history. I hope that sharing some of the insights I gained from the roughly three-year process that led to “Dark Prince” will encourage scholars who read this newsletter to submit more proposals to the association. Having more AHA panels on diplomatic history is a prerequisite, I believe, for increasing the stature of the field within the community of historians.

I admit that the AHA has some serious problems that are apparent in both its journal and its annual conference and limit the utility of this learned society to our field. The most significant of these stem from the compartmentalized nature of the historical profession. It is highly unlikely, for example, that military historians of the U.S. Civil War will get much out of sessions on the medieval Lithuanian church. Many sub-fields have their own conferences and journals now, so there is less need for an organization with such a broad focus as the AHA. Another issue is bias. We all know how unpopular diplomatic history is among our peers. When people raise this issue with the AHA program committee, the response of individual members is that they get almost no proposals for military, diplomatic, and political history panels. People with interests in these areas argue that they do not submit proposals because they know they will get rejected. What we get then is a self-fulfilling downward spiral in the number of diplomatic history panels at the AHA, and this development has had a detrimental effect on diplomatic history as a whole.

We as diplomatic historians should try to reverse that spiral. Presenting a paper at the AHA is still an important exercise in professional development. Anyone with job search committee experience knows that they quickly learn how little they know about other fields. Conference names and journal titles on a resumé mean little if the field is far from your own research and teaching interests. Does the average diplomatic historian know what the best forums are in Texas history, agricultural history, or medieval European history, for instance? But everyone recognizes the significance of the American Historical Association. Furthermore, whether a historian is trying to find employment or planning to apply for a grant, it is to their advantage to have an AHA presentation on their CV. Such an accomplishment also impresses tenure committees and deans. Finally, engaging with the larger historical community is a good way of enhancing both one’s own reputation and the reputation of one’s area of specialty. Active engagement with the rest of the profession can persuade historians in other fields that their home departments need to add positions in the area of diplomatic history, and the growth of our field is in all our interests.

So, what great words of wisdom do I have to offer about submitting panel proposals to the AHA?

1. Be patient. I applied three times before getting a panel accepted.

2. Abide by AHA panel requirements. These are: A) No one may be on the AHA conference program in two consecutive years. This rule is designed to spread the wealth. B) No gender-segregated panels. All panels must have both men and women. C) The members of the panel must be AHA members. The AHA has made exceptions for the likes of Oliver Stone and Newt Gingrich, but panel participants who are not celebrities must have paid their dues. D) Panels must have geographic diversity. They cannot have members from the same college or university.

3. Be optimistic. Getting the AHA program committee to accept your panel is not as difficult as it might seem. According to the 2001 Annual Report, the program committee received 287 proposals for 162 slots. Put into mathematical terms, in 2001 a panel stood a 56 percent chance of getting approved. I do not have figures for the last two meetings, but I doubt they are radically different. The odds of getting accepted float a little above or a little below 1 in 2.

4. Remember that the AHA program committee is much like a job search committee. The individual members might not know the important figures, issues or journals in fields other than their own. Make sure to state clearly and concisely the major issues your panel is addressing.

5. Emphasize the impact your panel will have in your subfield. Acceptance requires more than having three papers on topics that relate well to one another. Given the specialization in the history profession these days, one can argue that it is possible to have a successful and rewarding career without ever participating in an AHA conference or publishing in the American Historical Review, but, as I have indicated, the association still matters. Accordingly, proposals should have some historiographic significance. Imagine, for example, a submission for the 1980 AHA put forth by the early pioneers in Eisenhower revisionism: Robert A. Divine, Stephen E. Ambrose, Richard Immerman, Fred Greenstein, and Burton Kaufman. The proposal might have read, in part: “The individual research and findings of these papers challenge the dominant belief that Ike was a Nimrod.” Along those same lines, I do not think that having a proposed panel where every member has had at least three books published is going to have as much weight as a panel that makes a notable contribution to the literature. As a result, a panel with a graduate student as a presenter is not dead on arrival.

6. Keep your panel proposal short. Submission guidelines suggest that proposals include no more than fourteen pieces of paper. If every proposal for the 2001 conference stayed within these parameters, the program committee would have faced 4018 pieces of paper, or slightly more than eight reams. I doubt that every member of the committee has time to look at every page of every proposal. Accordingly, the cover proposal, the synopsis of each paper, and each CV should be no more than one page long. A good deal of time and craft should go into the cover proposal, since it might be the only part of the submission that gets much attention.

7. Try to address some issues that affect the profession as a whole. Like other members of my home department who have organized AHA sessions, I found that the program committee is receptive to proposals that address broad issues. In my proposal, I stressed globalization, internationalizing U.S. history, and the use of new sources in the classroom--i.e., the Lyndon Johnson telephone tapes. I also asked the paper presenters to stress these issues in the synopses of their papers.

8. If your proposal is rejected, try to keep your panel together and resubmit for the next meeting. Statistically speaking, the odds are in your favor. There is also a good deal of turnover in membership of the program committee from year to year, so your submission will be new to many of the people serving on that body.

9. Finally, my experiences are only those of one individual. Talk to other people who have put together AHA panels and ask to see their proposals. Weigh and evaluate the different this different information, and come to your own conclusions.

In closing, I hope the AHA program committee will get so many submissions in political, military and diplomatic history that they will have to include a substantial number of panels in these fields in coming years. Getting the pendulum of professional interest to swing in a direction that favors foreign relations will require a deliberate and sustained effort to engage more closely with the rest of the profession.