American+Historical+Association,+2009

The annual conference of the American Historical Association was held in New York City. This conference draws more than 5,000 historians and covered the entire gamut of history, from American history to ancient history to the most cutting edge and innovative work being done in history todya.

This was a great conference that, among other things, confirmed that our effort to globalized the curriculum is in line with what colleges and scholars in the field of history are thinking about. Whereas ten years ago the majority of sessions at this conference were on American and Western European history, this year, anecdotal evidence would suggest that perhaps two-thirds of the sessions were on topics in or related to world history. I attended a variety of sessions during which scholar gave papers on their work on various aspects of the history of the Indian Ocean. One session of particular interest was one that focused on four cities in the Indian Ocean, and looked at how the various people, goods, and ideas that have moved through the cities worked together across the Indian Ocean to create a web of exchange.

One of the highlights of the conference was an evening roundtable that featured seven of the most prominent historians writing today, including such well known names as Jonathan Spence, who writes on China, Natalie Zemon Davis, who writes mostly about Europe but recently publishing a book on the Islamic traveler Leo Africanus, and Jill Lapore, who writes mostly on early America. The subject of their roundtable was on "silence" in history, and they explored things like the moments immediately before death, the lack of physical descriptions of things in the historical record, and what we do as historians with the things in history that historical characters do not mention in their diaries, letters, and other personal documents (i.e. spouses, experiences, etc.). This was a most provocative discussion.

JAK