My wife has always been puzzled that I seem to enjoy going to meetings of the professional disciplinary organizations to which I belong. How about your spouse?

I think at one point I belonged to eight or 10 learned societies, but I have cut back to four or five, and I do usually enjoy the meetings. This past weekend I was in New York City for the Organization of American Historians annual meeting at the Hilton. In the morning on Friday I went to a much-touted session on “History From the Bottom Up” which was supposed to feature Staughton Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, and Howard Zinn — three aging (like yours truly) members of the profession who were “there at the creation.” Alas, Zinn’s wife was too ill for him to attend, and Lemisch’s ailing back did not permit him to attend. I found the session, which was well attended, pretty tepid and melancholy. So I left for a much livelier session on “Medicine, Law, and Commerce in the Making of American Consumers,” which featured three younger historians. This was what a good conference session should do — alert me to new work in emerging areas of research. The papers were well presented and the small audience (perhaps 20) had a lively discussion. I left feeling even more negative about the pharmaceutical industry than I had when I entered the room!

I was on only one panel, and that was simply an informational session on the new National History Center, affiliated with the American Historical Association, that a number of us have been trying to get off the ground. About 30 hardy souls turned up Friday afternoon to learn more about what the NHC is doing, confirming our sense that there are public activities in the service of Clio that the disciplinary organizations do not currently provide. I spent the remainder of the afternoon looking through the new books on display at the publishers’ exhibition and chatting with old and new friends in the profession — this is the piece de resistance at every good annual meeting, after all!

Most of Saturday was spent in a meeting of an NHC committee I chair (about which I wrote last month) preparing a White Paper for the Teagle Foundation on the role of the history major in undergraduate liberal education. We have a fine task force, and spent several hours going over a draft of the report — and trying to formulate specific recommendations for departments concerned with enhancing their effectiveness in supporting the aims of liberal education. One of our challenges is to address the incredible range of institutions in which students major in history. Even if one sets aside the hugely important community-college sector (our report concerns four-year institutions), it is very hard to generalize about the aims of history education in, say, liberal arts colleges, elite research universities, and general universities. One of our members reminded us, for instance, that the bulk of majors in her department were preparing to be K-12 teachers, whereas in my own institution, for instance, only a handful (alas) are headed for the schools. Now I have to redraft the report and get it back to the full task force for final approval.

I no longer teach in a history department, since I have been a member of a public-policy school faculty for the last 27 years, but history will always be my intellectual home. And “going home,” as I did at the OAH, is always socially and intellectually important to me.