Public at the Creation: Place, Memory, and Historical Practice in the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, 1907-1950

Abstract

Our Roots Flourished in Valley, stated former Organization of American Historians (oah) executive secretary Thomas D. Clark in his 1978 memoir of days when oah was Mississippi Valley Historical Association (mvha).1 The mvha did indeed incar nate regional origins of what in 1965 became oah. From its founding in 1907, association strove to represent the Valley. Though exact boundaries of fledgling group's aspirations were vague and it welcomed work on United States as a whole, its intellectual and organizational endeavors remained until 1940s fixed largely on region and place. The story of those regional origins has been told many times, not only in Clark's reminiscences but also in earlier reflections as mvha/oah celebrated milestones on way to its current centenarian status. As Clark understood, institutions both reflect and shape aspirations of groups. By linking mvha to historians who embodied agenda and intellectual movements that gave it substance, one breathes life into a study of institution. That understanding of links between members, movements, and institution guides following examination of how mvha's structures and traditions facilitated intellectual endeavor, translating it into collective historical practice. The common interpretation has highlighted transformation of a small commu nity of scholar-historians into a nationally oriented professional organization, sometimes reviewing mvha's past with a touch of nostalgia but more often with relief at es cape from such parochial roots. In 1978 Ray Allen Billington wrote humorously of bad old days. In 1940 William B. Hesseltine claimed that mvha had outgrown its regional beginnings and that its name had only antiquarian significance. John W. Caughey stressed glacial-like conservatism of mvha's journal and lapses into provincialism as well as a local history-society ancestry from which he wished to distance association in 1950s. Whether association had been born provincial was disputable, but argument remained that its heritage was regional and historians contrasted that heritage with a broader national view.2