Ian Tyrrell

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Ian Tyrrell | Public at the Creation: Place, Memory, and Historical Practice in the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, 1907–1950 | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

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

"Our Roots Flourished in the Valley," stated former Organization of American Historians (OAH) executive secretary Thomas D. Clark in his 1978 memoir of the days when the OAH was the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (MVHA)¹. The MVHA did indeed incarnate the regional origins of what in 1965 became the OAH. From its founding in 1907, the association strove to represent "the Valley." Though the exact boundaries of the fledgling group's aspirations were vague and it welcomed work on the United States as a whole, its intellectual and organizational endeavors remained until the 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 the MVHA/OAH celebrated milestones on the way to its current centenarian status. As Clark understood, institutions both reflect and shape the aspirations of groups. By linking the MVHA to the historians who embodied the agenda and intellectual movements that gave it substance, one breathes life into a study of the institution. That understanding of the links between members, movements, and institution guides the following examination of how the MVHA's structures and traditions facilitated intellectual endeavor, translating it into collective historical practice.

The common interpretation has highlighted the transformation of a small community of scholar-historians into a nationally oriented professional organization, sometimes reviewing the MVHA's past with a touch of nostalgia but more often with relief at the escape from such "parochial" roots. In 1978 Ray Allen Billington wrote humorously of the "bad old days." In 1940 William B. Hesseltine claimed that the MVHA had "outgrown its regional beginnings" and that its name had only "antiquarian significance." John W. Caughey stressed the "glacial-like" conservatism of the MVHA's journal and the "lapses into provincialism" as well as a "local history-society ancestry" from which he wished to distance the association in the 1950s. Whether the association had been born provincial was disputable, but the argument remained that its heritage was regional and historians contrasted that heritage with a broader national view.²

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