[Reprinted with permission; thanks to H-Survey Neil Sapper for preparing the text.][x _OAH Newsletter_, May 1997, p. 11]
In recent years, many have called for historians to reach out to a larger public. Historians have responded to these calls in many ways such as film-making, consultancies, public programming, and standard-setting. In 1996, we undertook to add yet another engagement with the public by establishing, with many others, the History News Service.
The History News Service (or HNS) is an informal syndicate of historians who are seeking to improve the public's understanding of current events by setting these events in their historical contexts. Independent of existing professional societies (although it received a welcome initial boost from the AHA), HNS has begun its work by soliciting op-ed pieces from historians and distributing the texts to newspapers around the country. HNS also refers working journalists and editors to historians. In the future, it hopes to improve formal links between news outlets and the historical profession.
The project is based upon three convictions. First, in an era of rapid change, citizens bombarded with unconnected facts, opinions, and claims often lack exposure to knowledge of the origins and past history of what is taking place around them and thus to knowledge of the significance of everyday events. Second, the complexity of daily events around the world often leaves journalists and editors, who must write under the twin pressures of deadlines and immediate public concerns, perplexed about the origins and larger significance of the breaking news they must cover. And third, while some journalists and editors are individually concerned about the historical meaning of breaking events and have developed circles of historians to whom they turn for assistance, in general links between the print and electronic press on the one hand and professional historians on the other are weak. HNS has been designed to try to remedy those problems.
Since nothing quite like it has been attempted before, HNS has had to start, as it were, from scratch. And only time will tell whether the initiative will work. Yet the early signs are promising. It is not too much to say that the initial response to a request for expressions of interest, published in the May 1996 issue of AHA _Perspectives_, yielded an unanticipated flow of responses. From them, we have drawn two conclusions. Many historians share our conviction that greater efforts are needed to bring historical knowledge to bear on citizens' present concerns. In addition, many historians have long and quietly been involved in undertaking on their own precisely what HNS is endeavoring on a larger scale. In fact, the profession already contains many unsung heroes of the journalistic arts, those who frequently and often regularly have been publishing pieces in local and regional newspapers, in the major and national dailies, and on established news wires without note or recognition from historians. We are trying to take inspiration, as well as learn, from them, and many of them are already involved in HNS's work.
How is HNS presently organized, and how does it work? A steering committee of fourteen people, both historians and journalists, some of whom are or have been both, directs its affairs. Its members have taken responsibility for recruiting those who might write pieces in specific fields, for editing submitted pieces, and for distributing edited texts. All correspondence and transmission of texts takes place by e-mail; and in fact it is impossible to conceive of the project's having been assembled so quickly and without any outside funding without the availability of e-mail links. Each submission is reviewed by one of us, always to make sure that it in fact offers historical contextualization of some issue and is not simply a partisan or ideological polemic and also so that we can offer some general observations to strengthen the piece if we believe that it does not yet warrant transmission for editing. When acceptable to us--and we must add here emphatically that we apply no ideological tests, and, as far as we can so far tell, those who have submitted texts to date span the ideological and political spectrum--a piece is then transmitted for editing to an editor who provides editorial suggestions and, to the extent possible, undertakes some fact-checking. Once the editor and writer agree on the text, it is sent forward for distribution to the press.
At present, HNS distributes its material--only op-ed articles (that is, those roughly 800-words long) and not feature-length pieces--to roughly 25 regional, daily American newspapers, all of which have expressed an interest in receiving texts. (We hope eventually to add Canadian papers, and of course Canadian historians are fully welcome to contribute.) Also, it distributes its pieces on a non-exclusive basis; that is, a piece may appear in more than one newspaper market in the same form at the same time. Each HNS writer, who retains full rights to submitted texts, is identified as 'a writer for the History News Service' and receives full and sole credit, as well as any honoraria, for the work. HNS has no members, only writers who are historians; and they write for HNS neither because of the possession of a doctorate nor membership in the academy, but because they have the ability and desire to use their historical knowledge for the illumination of current events. Articles may concern subjects in all, not just American, fields. All those who express an interest in working with HNS are put on an e-mail server list and receive occasional messages from us.
For the foreseeable future, HNS will test the journalistic water in these modest ways. It hopes to enlist as participants not only those who wish to write out for the general public but those who have the experience to undertake the often unrewarding work of editing and those who might assume responsibility for thinking up story ideas in particular fields and recruiting others to write about them.
We have much to learn, especially about journalism, as we proceed. Thus we look upon this endeavor as educational in the dual sense that all participants will be learning how best to achieve HNS's goals and that HNS may help create, through guidelines and editing, a group of historians who, perhaps now lacking experience in op-ed writing, will become masters of the craft.
Those who wish to participate should feel free to contact one or both of us at our e-mail addresses--James Banner via jbanner@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu and Joyce Appleby via appleby@history.ucla.edu. Guidelines for writing op-ed pieces, as well as sample texts with explanatory comments can be found at the HNS website: http://h-net2.msu.edu/~hns
James M. Banner, Jr. is an independent historian in Washington, D.C. Joyce Appleby, professor of history at UCLA, is president of the American Historical Association. They are co-directors of the History News Service.
[c] Organization of American Historians, 1997
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