Shameless but Non-Self-Promotional Promotion, or, Why You Should Join the Southern Historical Association

I've recently been appointed to head up the Membership Committee of the Southern Historical Association. While it doesn't start, technically, until November's annual meeting, I'm busy recruiting folks to be on the committee. So far, five folks I've successfully recruited as committee members indicated to me they had let their membership lapse, so they needed to rejoin in order to serve on the committee--and all of these have been good folks in the field of Southern History.

So this blog space will periodically be used to plug our little organization. For anyone with any interest in the history/literature/culture of the South, the SHA is the least expensive, most friendly organization going. Its annual meetings, usually the first week of November, are a treat, large enough to offer diverse intellectual experience but small enough to be welcoming (in contrast to the behemoth gatherings of the AHA or the AAR!). Also, since you're reading this blog probably for religious history rather than southern history content, I'll add that the Southern has become an excellent forum for panels, articles, and discussions on the history of religion in the South. Anyone who reads the Journal of Southern Religion should be in the SHA.

It's $40 to join, and you can do so online, and you'll get the Journal of Southern History. Oh, and for your graduate students, it's $10 -- there's stuff at Starbucks now that costs more than than that, so just give up a couple of of your double shot lite soy mochas and join.

End of pitch -- but you'll hear about this again periodically. Incidentally, the 2008 meeting is scheduled to be in New Orleans, and will feature the recently retired Berkeley historian Leon Litwack (full disclosure: my graduate advisor) giving the presidential address.

Update: In the comments section, The Historianess reminds me that "you needn't be exclusively an historian of the south to join--you can be an historian 'whose research is salient to key issues and themes in the history of the American South . . . ' "