Reporter Volume 26, No.21 March 23, 1995

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Bureau Staff
When the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and the National
Council on Public History (NCPH) meet in Washington, D.C., from March
30 through April 2, they will bring with them the idea that history
has come to matter in public life and that American historians have
something to contribute to the public discourse.
	Urban historian Michael Frisch, professor of history at UB and
chair of the program committee for the 1995 OAH-NCPH convention, says
the program will reflect the fact that these days, historians are
central to that discourse "in ways we had not anticipated."
	Frisch notes, for instance, that OAH President Gary Nash of
the University of California, Berkeley, "has become the whipping boy
of Rush Limbaugh for his efforts to bridge the gap between modern
scholarship and primary and secondary education." The construction of
social studies curriculums has, in fact, been an increasingly
important and contentious issue among educators for the past decade.
	Many of these issues will come to the fore again by spring,
when Frisch says he expects that the public agencies supporting much
of the work done by academic and public historians -- the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the National Archives, the National Park
Service and the Smithsonian Institution -- "will be on the chopping
block, fighting for their lives against an anti-intellectual public
purge rapidly gaining momentum."
	He calls it an "unusual concatenation that brings the
profession together at a critical moment" and says that he and his
program committee have tried to plan events in a way that they hope
"can help center what is necessary and important in this debate and
move beyond what is demagogic."
	Several events will focus on current controversies involving
history and historians and may shed a fresh light on issues that have
raised hackles up and down the political spectrum.
	The convention's plenary session on April 1, for instance,
will address the hot spotlight now trained on major public agencies
that support historical scholarship. Frisch says that in a roundtable,
the leaders of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the
Smithsonian's Museum of American History, the National Park Service
and the U.S. Archives will discuss the challenges, dilemmas and
contradictions inherent in their accountability to scholarship, the
U.S. Congress and the general public at a time when dramatic social
and cultural change make public discussion of history both difficult
and indispensable.
	Roundtable discussions on several other hot topics will be
held on March 30:
o	Historians and the Disney Challenge: A discussion of the
Disney Corporation's plan to develop a history theme park four miles
from the Manassas National Battlefield.
o	Hiroshima and the Politics of History: The Enola Gay
Controversy at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum:
Although this controversy was caricatured as a debate between the "two
PCs" -- patriotic correctness and political correctness -- it raises
questions about the role of scholars and scholarship in public history
processes and in public discussion.
	Discussants will include representatives of the National Air
and Space Museum, Air Force Magazine, the U.S. Air Force, the
University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Department of Religious Studies and
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
o	Other roundtables that day will address many other issues,
such as contradictory versions of the American past that were
assembled by leftist groups in Cold War Europe; childless Americans in
the 20th century (including a historical perspective on test-tube
babies) and the 1965 Voting Rights Act on its 30th anniversary, its
legal and political impact on American history.