Our History

 

It might have pleased the founders of the Northeast Conference on British Studies to see that the small gathering they mounted in the Spring of 1968 would give rise to a professional body for the study of the British past that would long survive most of them, providing a vibrant forum for the discussion of new work in the field. It would certainly have surprised them to see an organization that had become much less regionally focused, more formally integrated with the NACBS – and transformed in terms of the content of its annual conference programs (virtually all of which are available on our website).

 

In the midst of a cold New England winter, complaining about the loneliness of being a British historian up in Maine, Roger Howell, chair of the History Department at Bowdoin College, and soon to be Bowdoin’s youngest president, wrote to his colleague, David Berkowitz, at Brandeis University, suggesting the desirability of bringing together British historians teaching throughout New England. Howell had been in touch with officers of the Conference on British Studies and secured the names of members residing in New England. He had also heard about regional groups of British historians that were meeting elsewhere – in the San Francisco Bay area, in Southern Michigan, and around Pittsburgh. In March 1967, in a restaurant outside Boston, a small group of historians who Howell and Berkowitz had contacted met to discuss the founding of another such regional body, soon to be known as the New England Conference on British Studies.

 

The original “sponsors” of the NECBS agreed that the new organization should hold an annual meeting at which formal papers would be read, unlike what they assumed was the case with the Upper Ohio Valley Group of British historians, which held occasional social gatherings. The first conference of the NECBS took place at Bowdoin in April 1968, open to all members of the new group and attended by some forty scholars. Like all the early conferences, the first was a very small, chummy affair. It consisted of just two panels on which a mere six papers were read, all by established scholars employed in New England. The program also showcased a speaker from Britain, a coup for the first meeting of the organization, the Tudor historian Stanley Bindoff, who that year was a visiting professor at Harvard and who spoke on “The Early Tudor Section of the History of Parliament.”

 

A common thread ran through the annual conferences through the next decade: seldom were there more than four panels on any program; meetings took place in the Spring; papers were delivered primarily by men based in academic institutions in New England; graduate students did not deliver papers; and the colon in paper titles was not as ubiquitous as it would become. At many meetings, panels were not topically-oriented; rather, each panel would be devoted broadly to a time period – one designated “Tudor/Stuart,” one “Hanoverian,” one “19th and 20th Century England,” for example. At every conference there was usually a good meal. The 1973 conference concluded with “a lavish banquet followed by brandy and cigars.” The registration fee in 1974 ($8.00) included coffees and lunch, as well as sherry before dinner ($8.50), which was followed by “claret and brandy” – a nod to the traditions of the senior common room as a means of creating community amongst isolated British historians spread across New England.

 

Although speakers based in New England dominated the early programs, the growing strength of the organization as a forum for new work in British history attracted individuals from across the border in upstate New York. Nevertheless, no representative of a Canadian institution was to offer a paper at the annual conference until the Hanoverian parliamentary historian, Karl Schweizer, then at Bishop’s University in Québec, spoke in 1980 at the thirteenth meeting. It would take another nine years before a second Canadian-based speaker would appear on the program – Concordia University’s Bob Tittler, who would soon play a significant role in moving the gravity of the body northwards. As early as 1969 German emigré Ann Beck (University of Hartford) spoke on British medical administration in East Africa. But it was not until 1981 that any conference paper focused on the history of women in Britain – and a full decade after that before Susan Pennybacker (Trinity College) became the first female president of the NECBS.

 

Despite the enthusiastic beginnings, the organization lost momentum in the 1980s, often unable to mount an annual meeting. Moreover, the lack of any formal rules and established procedures for selecting officers and defining their roles further compromised the efficiency of the NECBS. This was noted by the executive of the national body as early as the 1970s when efforts were made to establish more formal relationships between the NACBS and the regional conferences. In 1977 the NECBS was chastised for failing to inform the national body of its officers and urged “to bring its practice into line with that of the other regional conferences.” The NECBS certainly played by its own rules, its officers resenting what they viewed as the high-handed interventions of the NACBS in its affairs.

 

Nowhere can these tensions be seen more clearly than in the failure of any joint conference to be held in the 1980s. While the NACBS desired to hold its national meeting with the NECBS in 1982, the regional body was busy making its own, separate plans. A joint conference eventually did take place, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but it was a small, one-day affair with a mere four panels. Six years later the executive secretary of the NACBS wrote to the long-serving chief officer of the New England body, complaining that the NECBS had no constitution or formally elected officers, that it lacked a local arrangements committee, and, furthermore, that it had not been meeting regularly – all of which made it “out of the question” for the NACBS to hold a joint meeting in 1989 in New England.

 

In 1991, NECBS members voted to adopt a formal constitution – the organization’s first – which gave it a much firmer foundation. Since then, conferences have taken place annually, without exception. The NECBS has also hosted the NACBS every six or seven years since 1993 for joint meetings. Furthermore, formal discussions were also held in 1991 to broaden the reach of the organization into Eastern Canada. Such a change had been mooted a decade or so earlier, but it was only at the outset of the 1990s that the importance of the role played by historians in Québec and the Canadian Maritimes in the work of the NECBS was formally recognized. At the remarkably successful NACBS/NECBS conference held in Montréal in 1993, NECBS members ratified a change in the name of the organization from the New England Conference on British Studies to the Northeast Conference on British Studies.

 

At the beginning of the 1990s, regional NECBS conferences still consisted of papers presented primarily by a relatively small number of scholars based in the Northeast. This would change in the aftermath of the 1993 Montréal joint meeting. For the remainder of the decade the annual conference might consist of twelve panels – roughly three times the size of the early gatherings. Graduate students were now increasingly presenting papers, while the number of panelists who hailed from institutions outside of New England and Eastern Canada grew rapidly, to some 50% towards the end of the decade. The annual conference also began to drift north: back to Maine for the first time since 1968; to Vermont; and especially to institutions in Canada – from Carleton in Ottawa to McGill and Concordia in Montréal, to Dalhousie in Halifax – further consolidating the identity of the NECBS as a genuinely broad-based, cross-border, regional body.

 

In the new century, the internet changed everything, extending the remit of the regional bodies way beyond the region they were initially designed to serve. It connected scholars far and wide; it democratized access to conferences, reducing the need to rely on organizational membership lists. This, coupled with the increasing need felt by younger scholars to get exposure for their work at professional gatherings, transformed and further fueled the growing scale of NECBS meetings. Paradoxically, shrinking employment prospects were accompanied by an expansion in the size of many NECBS meetings, several of which now included panels on the state of the field. Annual conferences in the 2010s could often sport twenty panels, growing to a whopping twenty-five panels at the fiftieth anniversary conference of the NECBS, held in Montréal in 2019.

 

In the last decade roughly thirty percent of all papers read have been presented by graduate students, many not based in New England or Eastern Canada. Recognizing the importance of the NECBS as a forum for younger historians to showcase new work, the NECBS inaugurated an annual prize in 2010 for the best paper presented by a graduate student, named for David Underdown, historian of seventeenth-century political culture who had always encouraged his Brown and Yale students to present their work at NECBS meetings. Furthermore, in order to secure tax-free donations for that prize and the other work of the NECBS, the organization also incorporated as a charitable, non-profit entity around the same time. More recently, continuing to meet for virtual conferences each year during the pandemic, the 2020 meeting was billed as a “virtual graduate and early career workshop,” continuing the emphasis placed by the NECBS on supporting the work of younger scholars.

 

The history of the NECBS sheds light on what has, over the years, counted as British Studies and who gets to speak on its behalf, illustrative of changes in the practices of the field. From its humble beginnings almost sixty years ago, the NECBS now flourishes as a vibrant forum for scholars of the British past to share their work, across New England and Eastern Canada, and increasingly well-beyond. Its pioneers might not recognize what the NECBS has become. Some might welcome its geographical expansion, the growth of its annual conference program, and the ever-increasing diversity of scholars at the meetings in terms of age, identity, professional status, and, most of all, intellectual interests. But changes bring forth new questions. How can the organization fulfill its original promise of binding together a regional community of British historians when conference participants hail from all over North America and beyond? To what extent does this alter the nature of the regionals, making them little more than smaller versions of the NACBS, requiring a reconsideration of their roles? One might lament elements of the world that has been lost, but there is also a need to celebrate the democratization and diversity of what the NECBS has become. The organization has survived for over fifty years because it has shifted with the times and has helped to shape what British Studies is today. Let’s hope it might continue to do so for the next fifty years.

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​Chris Waters is Hans W. Gatzke ’38 Professor of Modern European History emeritus, Williams College; he was president of the NECBS from 2009-2011.