The 2010 AHA Meeting: Fishing For A Proposal Idea

The 124th annual meeting for the AHA will be in San Diego. The theme is “Oceans, Islands, Continents.” Cool—on both counts. I’ve never been to San Diego, and it’ll be interesting to see how I can twist topics related to the great books idea and Mortimer Adler into the conference rubric. Hmm…Moby Dick is a “great book,” and it involved oceans and islands! There’s a start. And Melville wrote about lots of oceans and islands. So other Melville books might do. I wrote a retrospective review of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, and at least one Britannica Advisory Board/Selection committee member from the 1940s forwarded Dana’s book for inclusion. Maybe I could propose a roundtable on the literary merits the book?!

Any other ideas on how I can make the great books idea a topic friendly to the theme of “Oceans, Islands, Continents”—in relation to nineteenth or twentieth-century U.S. history? In the meantime, maybe I’ll actually read the second link I gave above. – TL

PS: Okay, I read the theme piece. I was on the right track.