by Tom Mascaro, Service Awards Committee Chair
Every historian can name archivists, compendia, and collections that facilitate our work in immeasurable ways. As we build from past AJHA conventions, we might look for ways to honor other nominees for the Distinguished Service Award from the ranks of historical preservation, more workshops on historical uses of specific collections, grant-writing workshops for media historians, and perhaps a consultant group within AJHA to build templates to help members find, write, and secure grants for media history.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Workshop on Media History Grant Proposals at last October’s virtual AJHA conference offers a jumping-off point for the association to consider how to expand our access to grants for the various aspects of journalism and media history.
Joshua Sternfeld, senior program officer for NEH, expressed keen interest in attracting media history funding proposals, including for preservation and access. Josh is highly knowledgeable about the NEH process and approachable as a resource for those interested in writing history project grants. Funds are also available from various state grants for history.
Ken Ward presented a Research-in-Progress proposal (AJHA 2020) on the use of geography databases to track the “expansion of newspapers across the American frontier.” Ken’s was an excellent project to involve multiple investigators on a history mission, the kind more commonly available to quantitative-scholar teams. His project requires a central leader, or Principal Investigator, but also associates that could easily come from the ranks of media history graduate students on various campuses. Such a project would not only present a proposal suitable to larger history grants, but it would also involve grad students and young scholars with AJHA and the grant-writing process, which would expand our membership and facilitate their careers.
AJHA honored James Danky with the rare Distinguished Service Award for his exceptionable commitment to preservation of “alternative” publications at the University of Wisconsin. We may want to have a discussion among the Service Awards Committee about ways to nominate and/or honor other archivists who serve the academic field in roles from outside academe.
In my field of documentary history, Daniel Einstein, the retired UCLA Film and Television Archivist, published an indispensable two-volume compendia cataloging every network news documentary and special report from 1955-1989. Every broadcast journalism historian of long-form, documentary, and news magazine history relies on Dan’s books.
Another stalwart professional who supports academe from outside the circle is documentary film archivist Kenn Rabin. Kenn’s list of credits includes The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, Eyes on the Prize, Vietnam: A Television History, Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey, and Ralph Ellison: An American Journey. He is always busy on film projects, but extremely knowledgeable about archive sources, Fair Use Copyright provisions, costs of footage, and the challenges to historical media projects. He would be a great addition to a future conference program as a speaker or workshop leader. I’m sure there are many more.
“Ideas” are easy; execution takes time and effort and a place on anyone’s busy schedule. That said, I could see using AJHA as a focal point for media historians who need assistance on grants. We could create an informal group of advisers, something more formal -- like a workshop somehow tied to our annual convention (without adding sessions), or maybe a Zoom group to help scholars complete their proposals in a timely fashion and search for innovative ways to fund our research. I’d welcome suggestions.
