David Hopkins's AHA Meeting Experience

This year’s American Historical Association’s (AHA) annual meeting was help in the great city of New Orleans.  It was my 5^th trip to the AHA meeting and, as usual, it did not disappoint.  Unlike smaller, more field-specific conferences, the AHA is quite large in terms of topical scope and attendance.   Considering the size of the meeting, the AHA manages to do a great job every year.   This year saw the debut of an AHA Meeting app – which made getting to the different panels very easy (it allowed you to add panels to your calendar as well as hotel floor plans and local maps).  The meetings (at least in my experience) are always very well organized and the staff on hand (usually fellow grad students) are always willing to help.

For me, at least this year, the wide variety of historical topics and themes limited the number of discussion panels in my research area (the Civil War and Reconstruction) and the few that they did have that were of interest to me were scheduled at the same time.  Panels usually run from about 8:30/9 a.m. until the late afternoon.  The few panels that I did attend were outstanding, including a panel that discussed the teaching of slavery and a panel on African Americans, racial violence, and collective memory (chaired by my advisor Kidada Williams).  I took advantage of my downtime at the meeting by going on a Reconstruction walking tour of New Orleans led by Jim Hogue of the University of North Carolina – a leading scholar of Reconstruction history in the city.  These tours are very cheap (I think I paid $12), a great way to see a new city, and meet other scholars in the same field.  The panels and tours are a great way to see what other scholars are doing and it is a means to remain inspired with your own work.

The fun and excitement of enjoying the nightlife in New Orleans (the French Quarter in particular) is a great way to wind down the night.  I took advantage of going to little, out of the way restaurants and bars to relax before retreating back to my hotel room.  I also took advantage of getting to know fellow grad students from Wayne State by meeting up with Jerry Sloan for a night out in the French Quarter.  Jerry and I met up for some food as well as a few drinks at the oldest bar in North America - Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop Bar (named for the famed New Orleans pirate, Jean Lafitte).  A good time was had by all!

While I did not present at the conference this year (or interview for any jobs), the AHA annual meeting is still a great way to meet other scholars and see the local sites.  It is also a good way to get inspired for your own research (or remain inspired!).  Many of the people I talked to at the meeting had nothing but nice things to say about Wayne State and I look forward to going to the next one.--David Hopkins

Congratulations to PhD candidate Beth Fowler!

Congratulations to PhD candidate Beth Fowler!  Beth won a 2013 Humanities Center Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to help complete the writing of her dissertation. Candidates from across the University competed for these awards, provided by the Humanities Center in collaboration with the Graduate School.  The fellowships provide support for students in the final stages of writing their dissertations. 

Louis E. Jones Service Award Dedication

On October 24, 2012, HGSA dedicated a plaque in the Bonner Seminar room with the names of the Louis Jones Service Award winners.  Dr. Louis E. Jones spoke about the founding of HGSA and discussed the importance of graduate student involvement in activities outside the classroom.  The winners of the service award are announced each year at the Department of History Spring reception.  The winners so far have been: 2010 - Maria Wendeln, 2011 - Tim Moran, 2012 - Beth Fowler.

A Historian's Humor

Q: How many historians does it take to change a light bulb?

A: There is a great deal of debate on this issue. Up until the mid-20th century, the accepted answer was ‘one’: and this Whiggish narrative underpinned a number of works that celebrated electrification and the march of progress in light-bulb changing. Beginning in the 1960s, however, social historians increasingly rejected the ‘Great Man’ school and produced revisionist narratives that stressed the contributions of research assistants and custodial staff. This new consensus was challenged, in turn, by women’s historians, who criticized the social interpretation for marginalizing women, and who argued that light bulbs are actually changed by department secretaries. Since the 1980s, however, postmodernist scholars have deconstructed what they characterize as a repressive hegemonic discourse of light-bulb changing, with its implicit binary opposition between ‘light’ and ‘darkness,’ and its phallogocentric privileging of the bulb over the socket, which they see as colonialist, sexist, and racist. Finally, a new generation of neo-conservative historians have concluded that the light never needed changing in the first place, and have praised political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for bringing back the old bulb. Clearly, much additional research remains to be done.

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Dear Dr. Leeson,

We regret that we cannot accept your historian joke in its present form. However, a panel of anonymous reviewers (well, anonymous to YOU, anyway) have reviewed it and made dozens of mutually contradictory suggestions for its... improvement. Please consider them carefully, except for the ones made by a man we all consider to be a dangerous crackpot but who is the only one who actually returns comments in a timely fashion.

1. This joke is unnecessarily narrow. Why not consider other sources of light? The sun lights department offices; so too do lights that aren't bulbs (e.g. fluorescents). These are rarely "changed" and never by historians. Consider moving beyond your internalist approach.

2. The joke is funny, but fails to demonstrate familiarity with the most important works on the topic. I would go so far as to say that Leeson's omission is either an unprofessional snub, or reveals troubling lacunae in his basic knowledge of the field. The works in question are Brown (1988), Brown (1992), Brown (1994a), Brown (1994b), Brown and Smith (1999), Brown (2001), Brown et al (2003), and Brown (2006).

3. Inestimably excellent and scarcely in need of revision. I have only two minor suggestions: instead of a joke, make it a haiku, and instead of light bulbs, make the subject daffodils.

4. This is a promising start, but the joke fails to address important aspects of the topic, like (a) the standard Whig answer of "one," current through the 1950s; (b) the rejection of this "Great Man" approach by the subsequent generation of social historians; (c) the approach favored by women's historians; (d) postmodernism's critique of the light bulb as discursive object which obscured the contributions of subaltern actors, and (e) the neoconservative reaction to the above. When these are included, the joke should work, but it's unacceptable in its present form.

5. I cannot find any serious fault with this joke. Leeson is fully qualified to make it, and has done so carefully and thoroughly. The joke is funny and of comparable quality to jokes found in peer journals. I score it 3/10 and recommend rejection.