History for the Twenty-First Century: The 114th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association

Abstract

The novelty of the new millennium proved too tempting for most to pass with out offering some reflections on the waning century or speculations for the fu ture, and the 114th annual meeting of the Historical Association (AHA) was no exception. The tone was set early by the announced theme of the conference (History for the Twenty-First Century: Continuity and Change) and its opening panel, which promised to consign the twentieth century to his tory. There were also sessions on Scholarly Publishing in the Twenty-First Cen tury and Interviewing in the Job Market in the New Millennium. By my count there were no less than eight panels at the conference that adopted an explicit ly millennial theme. Not to be outdone, labor historians added their musings with a roundtable entitled Labor History at the Millennium: International Cap italism and the Comparative Historical Dimension. The opening paper of the session by John D. French (Duke University) sketched a plan to revitalize labor history as a discipline following Seattle. He urged labor historians to reject both the discourse of a decline of the work ing class?which he notes is only true in a North Atlantic context, there being more industrial workers in the world now than in any previous period in histo ry?and globalization?a term he rejects as the functional equivalent of the discredited trope of modernization. A truly international capitalism must be paralleled, he suggests, by a truly comparative labor history. Nelson Lichtenstein (University of Virginia) echoed French's theme, sug gesting that the ideology of the American Century as embodied in Henry Luce has shifted from its moral roots (for Luce) to a triumphalism grounded in a high ly mobile capitalism that functions without ideological opposition at the present time. Emphasizing the importance of capital's geographic mobility as a strategy of beating labor, he suggested that labor history must historicize globalization in order to lay bare the ideological assumptions and teleology of the current rhetoric.