Well, tomorrow I am off to see the other History Boys and Girls. The annual meeting of the American Historical Association is being held in Washington, and I will probably be one of four or five thousand historians in attendance. It is a meeting I always look forward to, although it has changed significantly since I first attended the 1961 meeting (I think!) in Chicago. It is now much larger and more complex, for one thing, with many more paper sessions and committee meetings -– including those of other, affiliated historical associations. It is also a much larger and more challenging “meat market,” at which employing departments will interview and vet job applicants. It feels quite industrial strength these days, even though the AHA has gone to considerable lengths to humanize every aspect of the meeting. There is only so much that can be done to make a crowd feel like a family.

Actually, one of the changes over the years has been the gradual take-over of the paper sessions by younger historians, most of them untenured. In the first years I attended, many more sessions featured senior members of the history profession, and youngsters like myself went to observe them with the same reverence that we felt when we went to see, say, Sid Luckman quarterback the Bears at Wrigley Field (yes, the Bears played at Wrigley when I was in elementary school). But fewer senior scholars condescend to submit papers and sessions these days, and this is a change I regret. On the other hand, the sessions now feature some of the brightest and most interesting new voices in the field, and that is all to the good. But it is hard to know the players without a scorecard.

The biggest change for an oldster like myself is that the club-like atmosphere of the old AHA has pretty well disappeared. There were clubs based on graduate school affiliation (the Wisconsin history department was known as the Big Red Machine, so successful was it at job placement), specific fields of study (Latin Americanists over here!) and the like. But now there are too many people at too many hotels, and frequently one literally does not see old friends because they are staying at another hotel and attending sessions in different venues. So I, as I assume most, make appointments with friends for every breakfast, lunch, and dinner during the three days of the meeting — this assures that I see at least a few of the people I would like to see, but lacks something in serendipity!

My wife has never understood what I enjoy about the annual meeting experience, and I am sure she is not the only spouse to have that reaction. Well, it is no longer my club (and I suppose one should be grateful for that), but it is my professional society, and one of the most important ways that we socialize the young into the profession. When it works properly, it is a grand event. It works badly, I realize, for many newcomers and for anyone without institutional ties, and we need to keep thinking how to change that. But for me it is still a significant community experience in an academic world increasingly characterized by declines in social capital.