Opening Plenary Call for Panelists
The Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania Historical Association will take place from 10-12 October 2024 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In recognition of the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, our theme, “Identity and Politics in the Mid-Atlantic,” speaks to the individual and group identities that have long played an important role in the region’s political culture. The program committee welcomes nominations for panelists on the plenary roundtable to discuss public history interpretations of immigration in Pennsylvania’s industrial communities.
The plenary roundtable will follow a talk by Dr. Katherine Benton-Cohen on her publication “Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy.” The program will be held at the Heritage Discovery Center in Johnstown, a 2024 PHA conference host. A long-term exhibition at the Heritage Center titled “America Through Immigrant Eyes” is an immersive experience in which visitors assume the roles of east-central European immigrants to Johnstown ca. 1910. Visitors learn that immigrants used the family economy and institutions they created to meet their goals, and became American on their own terms. A proposed new concluding section of the exhibition will examine the eventual inclusion of these immigrants and what their experience means to Americans today.
We encourage expressions of interest by 1 August 2024. Please contact Dr. Allen Dieterich-Ward, the program chair, by email at ajdieterichward@ship.edu or phone: (717) 477 – 1192.