The annual meeting of the Georgia Association of Historians was this past weekend in Milledgeville, a beautiful town I had never visited. The ride there on Friday morning was as pleasant as any I’d had in a long time-- getting out of that Atlanta-area traffic, driving down highway 441 through Putnam County, “Dairy Capital of Georgia”-- the fields, the cows, the pecan trees, very pretty. About two Baptist churches every mile.
Milledgeville is fairly small, easy to find your way around, whether you’re driving or walking. I arrived at 10:30, too early to check into the hotel or register for the conference, so I
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Then, check in to the hotel and off to the conference. I got there just in time for the first round of sessions. I went to “Holocaust Fatigue: Is the Holocaust Losing in the Classroom?” The participants were from Kennesaw State University’s Holocaust Education program, and the session was quite thought-provoking--about how we teach not only the Holocaust but other subjects, and the differences between education in the classroom and in museums.
Second session, I went to “Politics and Law in the Antebellum South,” with papers on poor whites in
After a break, the evening plenary session, featuring Arnita Jones, executive director of the American Historical Association, speaking on “Trends in the Historical Profession.” It was a good and informative talk, but it got off to a funny start. After the
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Second day, I skipped the first morning session (I know, bad boy) and drove around town. My session was at 10:30. I talked about Georgia-born writer Marian Sims as an early “revisionist” novelist. Also on the session was an old friend of mine, Catherine Oglesby, who has just submitted a book manuscript on another Georgia writer, Corra Harris. Cathy talked specifically on Harris on race and the Lost Cause. She’s been working on Corra for so long, writing and presenting, that when she said “Harris was best known for her 1910 novel A Circuit Rider’s Wife,” I wondered how many times she has said and written that sentence. It was a good session, thanks in part to the good audience that attended.
Lunch/final plenary session: The chicken tasted funny, everything else was OK. My Kennesaw colleague Tom Scott had arranged the program, which featured two famous Georgia historians, Tom Dyer and Edward Cashin, talking about their “Lives in History,” as the program was titled. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wish my students could have heard Cashin talk about historic myths-- how they come about and what uses they serve.
One of the best things about these conferences is being able to see and catch up with folks.
Anyway, that’s how I spent my weekend.