The Origins of the Magazine

Joan Hoff

I also want to single out a few people.  Terrie Epstein sent me the original outline regarding the magazine; I later carried that outline to the Rockefeller Foundation.  After considerable negotiation and modification, they accepted the proposal.  Due to people like Terrie and Marjorie Bingham, who chaired the first Magazine advisory committee, Howard Mehlinger, who served on that committee, the magazine received a solid grounding, Clair Keller, who was then chair of the OAH Committee on Schools and Colleges.  Michael Regoli, now Managing Editor of the Magazine, was responsible in a single-handed way for making it from the beginning a relatively inexpensive, in-house operation—but, of course, at much time and expense to himself.  There is another person who is largely forgotten in this entire process because, whom I’ll mention in a moment.  First, let me say that the Magazine was but one of seven different high school outreach programs that the OAH was dealing with at the beginning of the 1980s.  And the woman who took on extra duties in terms of those outreach programs was Jeanette Chafin, the Business Manager at the OAH.  She had to juggle and balance the grants for these high school projects.  Originally, it took a lot of our time and effort to make the Magazine an inexpensive publication.  There were also a number of editors at the very beginning.  We began with Kathryn Caras, then Kathy Rogers, then Judith Roman, and then the last one that I dealt with extensively was Lori Alexander.  So in about a four or five-year period, we had four or five different editors working on the premises at the OAH. 

The other group that usually fails to get much mention or credit are the number of pro bono guest editors and the authors who wrote for the Magazine.  Without that kind of hard work on the part of these people, we really couldn’t have gotten it off the ground, even with the Rockefeller money. 

Now, I want to indicate where I think the Magazine fits into the activities of the OAH back in the early 1980s.  It became part of a three-pronged program that, as I look back at my reports to the Organization, I introduced in a grandiose way in 1981-1982.  I said that from that point forward, we were going to concentrate on reform of the history curriculum, advocacy work, and outreach.  I was trying to 
combine the functions of the OAH—    traditionally those of a scholarly association with those of a learned society with that of a professional association—which would devote part of its time to public policy.  However, I was trying to do that in 1981-1982 at the same time that I was downsizing the Organization itself because we were in a terrible financial crisis.  So we were taking on additional duties, downsizing, and thinking that we were going to get away with all of this.

In reviewing my private notes and public correspondence for that time period, it’s clear we realized that it was not going to be an easy task, and yet we felt that despite the downsizing we were forced to undertake, it would be worthwhile.  So from 1981-1985 when the first issue of the Magazine of History came out, the OAH had begun to pursue several curriculum reform and outreach efforts at both the high school and the college level.  By 1984-1985, these efforts had culminated in a number of projects.  For one thing, we had completed packets—called “Rediscovering History”—for integrating women’s material into the U.S. history and western surveys.  That came as a result of a $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant begun in 1979.  By 1984-1985, we’d also obtained money from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to set up faculty teams to visit colleges and universities to evaluate graduate programs at these institutions.  In each locale, we wanted to see how we could, when possible, obtain internships for graduate students in local businesses or in museums.  It was a part of our public history outreach initiative. 

In 1981 when I set this three-pronged goal or program for the goals of the Organization, the question of high school history teachers had not been a top priority of the OAH.  Their role in the organization was somewhat ambiguous, and our services to them were even more ambiguous.  But by 1984-1985, in just that three or four-year period, we were participating in seven high school outreach programs.  By the time we negotiated with Rockefeller to start the Magazine of History, we already had established “Professional Day for History Teachers” at the Annual Meeting.  These have since become our Focus on Teaching sessions.  We had just completed with Exxon a study entitled “Strengthening History Education in High Schools,” under the direction of Page Miller.  At Indiana University, we were cooperating with the ERIC Clearinghouse, which was relocated to the IU campus in the early 1980s—due in large measure to Howard Mehlinger’s efforts.  We were working with ERIC Clearinghouse and the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) on some projects, especially those designed for introducing history materials into high school teaching.  We were also cooperating with the NCSS and the AHA to form the History Teaching Alliance.  And finally, the seventh project that we had going by 1984-1985 was the publication of an in-house series of pamphlets exclusively designed for high school use.  Of those seven initiatives, three of them remain in place today—functional and operational in a permanent way.  These are the Magazine of History, the History Teaching Alliance, and the Focus on Teaching Day sessions.  The latter is very well integrated into our Annual Meeting. 

I noted in a 1986 report to the OAH that this unprecedented number of high school outreach programs was due primarily to a shift in available funds on the part of the Rockefeller Foundation and other major funding sources.  I don’t think this point can be overemphasized.  The OAH could not have, and in all likelihood would not have, engaged in any of these high school outreach programs if national and state funding priorities had not changed to emphasize secondary education.  To a certain degree, our interest in implementing high school outreach was made possible by internal decisions of foundations and government agencies over which we had no control, but to which we responded with ideas of our own.  Since we had nothing to do with those initial foundation decisions, I think we should be more critical of changes in funding priorities, to determine whether these priorities are really in the interest of the history profession in the interest of the foundations.  In any case, that’s how we were able to get into the business of high school outreach—largely because of a significant change in emphasis at the foundation level, including public agencies like NEH and FIPSE. 

My private notes dictated to myself and to other people on the staff as I was driving to airports in either Indianapolis or Louisville are long and detailed.  In retrospect, they constitute a stream of consciousness about high school outreach programs, and I am grateful to Mike Regoli for retrieving them from the files for me.  I talked about my conversations with Rockefeller about how to get a high school publication off the ground, and initially, as Terrie said, we were calling the publication a newsletter.  By 1983-1984 we described it as a magazine.  My notes reveal that we had first begun to think about it at a very informal meeting of high school teachers in Cincinnati in 1983 and then, beginning in 1984 in Los Angeles, we actually started a formal program for high school teachers at our Annual Meeting, which has lasted to the present.  I remember talking especially with Jerry Bobilya, who was in charge of our professional division within the OAH at the time.  He and I came up with a very bare-bones budget for Rockefeller.  Our first proposal asked for a half-time editor at $8,000; we had administrative costs of $4,000; and about $500 for a consultant.  We had worked the unit cost per issue down to 38 cents.  I don’t know what it is today, but I doubt very much if it’s 38 cents.  Anyway, the largest item in this original budget was for travel, lodging, and meals for the advisory board, the members of which received no honoraria (neither did the first volunteer guest editors).  The advisory board proved to be the key for many of the ideas that later became institutionalized in the Magazine, especially the student section and the lesson plans.  The advisory board more than earned its travel and lodging.  There was a lot of pro bono 
work that went into the whole process.

When the first issue appeared in April of 1985, its most memorable feature turned out to be—not any of the ideas that we tried to incorporate from the advisory board—an interview with Bobby Knight, conducted by the first editor, Kathryn Caras.  Now you might wonder why that first issue had an interview with Knight.  The reason is very simple.  Surveys indicated that anywhere from 50-80% of all high school history teachers coached some sport.  Once we conveyed this information to Steve Levine and Alberta Arthurs at the Rockefeller Foundation, they began to worry about how we were going to make this magazine relevant to people who were primarily coaches and, perhaps, only secondarily interested in history.  One of the ideas that we came up with in house at the OAH was this interview with Bobby Knight who is, by the way, a history buff.  So the inclusion of it was not as far fetched as some might have thought at the time. 

After we published the inaugural issue with this interview, Steve Levine said that one of Knight’s comments was worth the entire subscription for the first year: “If a school doesn’t have a language lab, it shouldn’t have an athletics program.”  He was also very strong on the subject of history, saying: history “provides us all with a sense of origin. . . . Educators should make the past come alive for students.  It can’t be taught as a series of dates or a succession of battles or the names of commanders.  Rather, it should be taught to answer the question, ‘Why?’”  However, I can’t say that we actually increased our subscriptions among coaches after that issue appeared. 

From the beginning, the Magazine of History had a multicultural emphasis.  We also thought we would aim it almost exclusively at Advanced Placement (AP) teachers.  But after talking with both Alberta and Steve at the Rockefeller Foundation about the large number of coaches among the ranks of high school history teachers, they convinced that they did not want their money used exclusively for the exceptional AP high school teachers.  I knew that they were the most discipline-oriented of the high school teachers, and I believed that the OAH had more ability to attract them.  Instead, I agreed to appeal to the average (whatever that might have meant) high school history teacher, considering their strengths as coaches rather than their weaknesses as history teachers.  The OAH would encourage them to use some of the same methods in teaching history that they used in coaching. 

The OAH was unable to fulfill that aspect of our 1984 mission because we really didn’t know how to do it.  We really didn’t know how to reach out to coaches so that perhaps those instructors who weren’t coaches could look at how coaches taught sports to see if there was some connection between teaching sports and teaching history that they could utilize.  The OAH has, I think, successfully appealed to the more discipline oriented high school history teachers, whether they coach or not.  I don’t think we were ever able to reach down to the instructor who was primarily there to coach and not to teach history.

I’m of several minds about whether the long-lasting high school projects of the OAH like the Magazine of History, the History Teaching Alliance, or the Focus on Teaching Day sessions represent transitional reform or real transformation, as reflected in the title of this session [“Transitory Reform or Real Transformation: A Tenth Anniversary Retrospective on the OAH Magazine of History and History Education Reform”] after all.  I think the title of the session is more confusing than it is enlightening.  It’s like “reinventing government.”  I still don’t quite know what that means either.  We’re using terms these days that I think are not clarifying in any particular way.  For one thing, this creation of a false dichotomy between transitional reform and real transformation is maybe the wrong issue to consider.  We know, or we think we know, from Gertrude Stein’s purported dying words that asking the right questions is more important than the right answers.  I think the real question in this case is: has history education reform in the last decade, as represented by these three permanent OAH projects and culminating, perhaps, in the proposed national history standards, has that remained true to history or have these projects simply become trendy, postmodern, politically-correct versions of history in the name of symbolic diversity?  I can’t speak for the current content of the program of the History Teaching Alliance because I simply haven’t kept up with it.  But it seems to me that the vast majority of the Focus on Teaching sessions on this year’s program, and the contents of the recent issues of the Magazine of History, have remained true to history as a distinct discipline within the humanities rather than a form of literary criticism based on deconstruction or some watered-down version of the social sciences.  I say this carefully, but I say it strongly, in part because I still can understand the titles of the Focus on Teaching sessions in our program, and I can still understand the articles and the lesson plans in the Magazine of History.  No one has to translate the titles for me or explain the content of the sessions or of the articles.  As I look back, I don’t believe that our goal at the time in the early 1980s or mid-1980s was to transform history in the literal sense of that word, but to revitalize it.  Now, reform is not always transitory, as the title of this session implies, and transformation is not always positive.  Very often real transformation has a number of unintended, usually negative, consequences.  So I think that if transformation were represented in the Magazine of History today, it might be based on the post-structural trends currently prominent in some subfields of the discipline of history, making the publication and other OAH history education reform programs irrelevant for most high school history teachers who must continue to rely on factual historical narratives for conveying information to their students.  The Magazine of History has contributed, I think, to making these narratives more diverse and more representative of the demographic nature of our country, especially in terms of women and minorities.  But in doing so, the Magazine has remained true to history as common sense narratives rooted in material conditions.  It hasn’t, in my opinion, gone in the direction of history as construct with no attachment to real people or actual events.  The Magazine of History has succeeded, instead, as an example of pragmatic reform—as the practical application of history education reform at the high school level.  This successful reform has not been transitory and due to the hard work of the OAH staff and the guest editors.  So I’m very grateful today to see some of them here and for their continuing efforts.  I only wish that they were all here today so that we could thank them personally for what they’ve done to create this magazine of permanent reform.  I especially want to thank OAH Past President Lou Harlan for finally folding it into the OAH budget as a line item.  I think the Magazine is here to stay because it does still speak to the type of history that can only be most effective at the high school level—history showing diversity through concrete historical narratives.