Happy New Year! Like the British Army two centuries ago, historians are descending on Washington this week in massive numbers (though likely with somewhat better results for the White House and Library of Congress) for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. It’s an exciting time for the profession overall as discussions and meetings take place, and a harrowing time for those attending for job interviews. And apparently we’ll all get to see how badly the region handles winter weather.[1]

Junto members will be live and in action throughout the weekend presenting papers on teaching music history, Henry Adams, Methodists, and *ahem* the Post Office. In other words, we’ll be at the following sessions:

22. Public Interest, Private Profit: Business, Government, and the Civic Good

44. The Challenge of Studying Music and History Together

ASCH 10. Fracturing a Global Empire: Religion and Place in the American Revolution

ASCH 36. Highways of Providence: American Seekers in a New World, 1870-1990

The conference will also include many fabulous panels on early American history or that include presentations by scholars working on early America and the Atlantic world. The program is massive overall, so we make no claims to comprehension, but we’ve gathered as many as we could here:

4. Surviving the First Years of Teaching: A Roundtable Discussion (which while not topically early American features several early Americanists)

14. Degrees of Unfreedom: Slavery and Contested Liberties in the Atlantic World

17. Mixed Feelings: The Politics of Emotions, Race, and Gender in Civil War-Era America

CLAH 4. Forming Family: Slavery, Freedom, and the Black Household in New Granada and Colombia

ASCH 7. Printing Evangelicalisms: Evangelical Book Culture across Three Centuries

CLAH 16. New Directions in Colonial Andean History

CLAH 17. Writing across the Margins or Breaching Boundaries in Latin America and Beyond

CLAH 20. Religion, Refuge, and Resistance in Indigenous History

CCWH 2. Uneasy Empire: The Play of Sex, Race, and Gender in Missionary Encounters

116. In Search of a Brighter Future: Children in Jamaica’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom, 1788–1918

CLAH 29. Reforming Cartographies in Enlightenment Latin America

121. Slavery, Intimacy, and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic

136. Fashioning Colonies and Empires

ASCH 19. The Message is the Medium: Missions to Indians as Central to the Early American Republic

ASCH 20. Re-Imagining the “Missionary”: Definitions, Debate, and Voices of Disagreement from the American Margins to World Christianity

169. Religion and the American Civil War: History and Historiography

CLAH 49. Local Sovereignties and Imperial Crises: Chile, Venezuela, and the Río de la Plata, 1750–1812

189. Documenting Runaway Slaves in the Atlantic World: Sources and Uses

191. Florida after Ponce de León: New Findings to Challenge Old Frameworks

199. Riotous Democracy and American Political Culture in the Nineteenth Century

202. The Limits of Empire: Imperial History in the Wake of the Transnational Turn (featuring comment by the Princeton professor I like to think of as the “other” J. Adelman)

203. The Persistent “Puzzle of…Climate”: Climatic and Microclimatic Challenges to Atlantic Empires

205. What Is Iberian about the Atlantic? A Roundtable on the Future of a Globalized South Atlantic History

ADHS 3. Debating Intoxication in the Atlantic World

214. Antecedents to the Age of Revolutions: Free People of Color, Social Mobility, and Resistance in the Late Colonial Caribbean

216. Bourbon Spain in Global Context: Reform in the Age of Enlightenment, 1700–1808

ACHA 22. Catholicism in the Late Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic

CLAH 68. Hidden Transnational Connections in the Black Caribbean and Atlantic: Narrative and Methodological Challenges

Last, the receptions! This year marks the AHA’s first (annual?) Reception for Bloggers and Twitterstorians this evening (at the Omni Shoreham), which as supporters of the AHA’s outreach to the blogging and Twitter communities we very much appreciate and look forward to.

Please feel free to use the comments as an open thread for the conference. What panels are you excited to see? What restaurants have you found in the vicinity of the hotels? Are there papers you found particularly compelling? (Or, as they say, any worth writing home about, perhaps by sending a letter through the Post Office?)

Enjoy the conference, say hi if you see us, and good luck to all interviewees!

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[1] Grocery stores in Maryland, Virginia, and DC regularly sell out of toilet paper when there are reports—reports—of more than 1/2″ of accumulation. I’m not kidding.