Annual Report of the Secretary-Treasurer

Abstract

Annual Report of the Secretary-Treasurer Stephen Berry (bio) In her engaging history of the southern historical association, Bethany Johnson paints a particularly compelling portrait of the Association at its nadir during World War II, when, three years out of four, it decided not to hold an annual meeting. Students and faculty alike had raced into the army or to Washington, D.C. Graduate programs were anemic. Scholars were too distracted to write. The Journal had barely enough books to review. "It breaks my historical heart to vote for cancellation," one Executive Council member noted, "but there seems [to be] no other course." Some feared the Association would never recover, but when the war ended, meeting attendance skyrocketed, and the 1946 meeting was the second-largest to that date. The Program Committee credited "the social side" of the SHA for the speedy recovery. Members had returned simply because they missed each other, because "we have all been separated for so long." Past is prologue: the pandemic has put a strain on the Association, but there remains a prevailing sense of community and endurance. President Thavolia Glymph deserves particular credit in steering the Association through turbulent times. We should credit, too, the longest-serving Program Committee in SHA history. Co-chairs Kendra Field, Joseph Reidy, and Randy Sparks, along with the rest of their team, created a fantastic in-person meeting and then adapted it as one of the first virtual meetings of a major historical association in the United States. While some program participants chose to delay their presentation until the 2021 meeting in New Orleans, our "Virtual Memphis" meeting featured fourteen concurrent sessions, an opening plenary featuring poet Nikki Finney, all of the usual administrative and business meetings, a virtual graduate student lunch, a virtual book exhibit, drop-in sessions for mentoring and editing advice, and much more. While we deeply regretted not being able to meet in Memphis in person, the city remained a [End Page 317] focus of the meeting, with panels such as "All Roads Lead to Memphis: Excavating the City's Multicultural Roots" and "Memphis Since King: The Struggle to Make Black Lives Matter in the Bluff City." Another strong theme of the meeting was the vitality of southern women's history, as the Southern Association for Women Historians celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Program highlights included "By One Vote: Woman Suffrage in the South"; "Radical Women/Queering Southern History"; and "Sisterly Networks: Fifty Years of Southern Women's History." The program was capped by an awards ceremony featuring the announcement of a new article prize in southern women's history. Founded and largely funded by Joan Cashin of Ohio State University, the Anne Braden Prize was established to commemorate the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing the right of women to vote, and will be given annually by the SHA to the best journal article or edited essay focusing on southern women's history. Articles on women from every racial, ethnic, class, or subregional background are welcome. The first prize will be awarded at our Baltimore meeting in 2022, to an article published in 2021. The Executive Council met virtually on Thursday afternoon, November 19, 2020, ahead of the opening evening plenary. Decisions included 1) the formation of a new standing committee devoted to enforcing our sexual harassment policy; 2) the adoption of a new "one year off" rule, which requires all program participants in a given year to sit out the next year before being eligible to participate again; and 3) the restructuring of the Membership Committee, whose members will now serve three-year terms. Membership Committee chair Kelly Kennington deserves particular recognition for overseeing the overhaul of the committee and its duties. Like most major historical associations, the SHA has seen slight but steady declines in membership for more than a decade, but Kennington and her team are reversing the trend. In conjunction with our Graduate Student Council, the SHA inaugurated a micro-grant program for graduate students willing to write reflective pieces for our blog (thesha.org/blog) about their research, teaching, and lives in the shadow of the pandemic. Ultimately we made seventeen awards, and the blog provided a forum...