1) Travel money: Yes, the reality is in the current economic climate, many of our universities have very little, if any, money allotted for conference travel.  Everyone from my UC Irvine cohort paid for the PCB-AHA out of their own pocket, opting for the cheapest of travel options (train or discount flights because few of us have cars that work well enough to travel the desert in mid-summer) and then sleeping two to a bed to offset the pricey conference hotel rooms.  The most frugal of us also brought along homemade sandwiches to defray meal expenses.

2) Banquet registration:  None of my fellow grad students were able to afford the banquet options at the conference.  Perhaps a system to ‘sponsor a grad student’ at the banquets would be helpful, as I suspect that many of us lost networking opportunities by not being able to attend. I could imagine a scenario where a senior-level faculty member would not only pay for the meal of a grad student, but also take said student under their wing at the meal and introduce him/her to other faculty members in their field.

3) Facilitating pre-conference collaboration for carpooling & room-sharing: A listserv or FaceBook group for grad students looking to share costs for travel to a conference would not only make the conference less pricey for student attendees, but could also foster other pre-conference collaborations, which leads me to point #4…

4) Fostering informal  ‘unconference’-style student forums:  One thing that I’ve learned from my work on the MHpodcast is that there are numerous graduate student concerns that could be benefit from cross-campus conversations.  This booklet from the AHA is one attempt at addressing the needs of graduate students.  However, facilitating focus groups at conferences would be even more helpful than a pamphlet in addressing specific grad student concerns.  This could be organized in an ‘un-conference’ manner either by having students form interest groups prior to the conference through FaceBook or via an informal brainstorming session at the beginning of the conference.  With either method, grads could propose groups based on their subfields of history or on topics related to the graduate experience (such as applying for external funding, using Zotero, dissertation writing, balancing parenting with academia, etc).  Conference organizers could support the topic groups by setting aside a room for group meetings–perhaps a lounge or a room with a roundtable setting. These meetings would also fit nicely into mealtimes, so if a grad student discount could be arranged at the hotel restaurant or bar, that would be helpful (in my experience, the high cost of eating at the hotel venue typically prevents students from doing so).

In compiling this list, I should say that none of these suggestions are, in any way, meant as a critique of my PCB-AHA experience. This conference has the well-deserved reputation of being an accessible and friendly venue for graduate student participation. I am certainly grateful for the support and collegiality that I experienced while presenting my paper and attending various conference sessions and I’m already looking forward to next year’s event.

This being my first AHA, I’ll be at many of the talks aimed at graduate students.  Also, I’ll be attending sessions that focus on writing and disability.  I’m told that anxiety levels can be pretty high here for those of us trying to make a good impression.  However, even as I’m trying to put my best foot forward, I’m reminding myself that this business of history-making should be fun, too.  So if you’ve got any speicifc advice for an AHA newbie–let me know!

Links to some of Jeff’s favorite reads:

• Jonathan Spence, The Question of Hu
• Amitav Ghosh, In An Antique Land
• Mike Davis, City of Quartz
• Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
• The travel writing of Pico Iyer
• Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Wasserstrom’s latest book, China’s Brave New World, was featured on a list of Pankaj Mishra’s favorite books of 2007. Mishra writes, “In this book Jeffrey Wasserstrom shows why he is one of the most sensible writers on a subject that most Western writers spoil with either paranoia or excessive awe.” Jeff is also a member of The China Beat blog team.

Stay tuned for next week’s episode of MHP with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, AHA president-elect and author of Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.

• How do those writing about the past convey what they have learned and the arguments they want to make?
• What rhetorical devices do they use to try to enlighten, capture the attention of, provoke, persuade, or even amuse their reader?
• Why do we think of some academic historians as especially good stylists or practitioners of the craft of historical writing?
• What place, if any, should there be in non-fiction historical writing for techniques and approaches more often associated with one or another genre of fiction?
  
• Why do some book reviews stick with us while others are immediately forgettable?

Below are the texts that we’re reading for the seminar (with hyperlinks). The books were all paired with relevant readings on the class syllabus. However, for ease of posting here, I’ve disrupted the connections and chronology. Many apologies to Jeff in this regard.

It’s my hope that this list, and other material at the Making History site, will be a catalyst for future classes on the craft of writing history, particularly experimental history:

Books:

Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre
Vanessa Schwartz’ Spectacular Realities
Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City
Mary Beard’s The Parthenon
Natalie Z. Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre
Jonathan Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang
Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights
Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian
Perry Anderson’s Spectrum

Articles:

Urban History, “Icons” issue multimedia companion
Mike Davis’ “The Flames of New York”
Jane Kamensky’s “Our Buildings, Our Selves”
Laura Mitchell’s “Beyond Tense: Encouraging Historians to Think Hard about Writing and Reading”
Martha Hodes’ “A House in Vermont, a Caribbean Beach: Beckoned by landscapes beyond the archive”
Jon Wiener’s “The Weatherman’s Temptation”
Mary Beard’s “A Don’s Life” blogposts
Hanchao Lu’s “The Art of History: A Conversation with Jonathan Spence”
Greg Grandin’s “Toward a Global New Deal”
Jill Lepore’s “No More Kings”
Martha Nussbaum’s “Body of the Nation”
Pankaj Mishra’s “Impasse in India”