First of all, thank you. Thank you to our program committee, the host committee and local institutions, our onsite volunteers, speakers, tour guides, and everyone else who contributed so much of their energy to the Detroit annual meeting. Thanks as well to the Michigan Museums Association, which brought its unique perspectives and local expertise to this really amazing joint conference.
And thank you to our participants, all 960 of you! It was energizing to see so many familiar faces and even more new ones over the course of four exciting days. Your ideas, questions, networking, and enthusiasm made this one of the most dynamic, engaging Annual Meetings that AASLH has had. So many hallway conversations and ideas from sessions are still buzzing in my head. True to our theme, this year’s sessions showed that AASLH members have committed to constantly evolve and embrace new opportunities. Though there is still a lot of work to be done, this was a week of challenging the assumptions that have served us to this point.
Discussion being led by Isra El-beshir (Arab American National Museum) during “Cultural Competency: A Powerful Tool for Change”
Give and take throughout the conference sessions was fantastic this year. We’ve organized all the best Twitter takeaways by session on the Official 2016 Annual Meeting Storify so you can get in touch with those speakers if you want to know more. By the way, we probably set an AASLH Annual Meeting Twitter record: over 1500 unique tweets were shared on the #AASLHMMA2016 hashtag from Tuesday through Saturday!
You can see and download all our professional photos taken at the event on this Google Drive folder , and I encourage you to upload any of your own photos to this folder so we can share them online. You can download or upload any session slides in this folder.
Attendees up early for riverside yoga
We recorded 13 sessions this year as well as the 2016 Meeting of the Membership, our keynote addresses by Tom Sugrue and Mary Wilson. You can access them for free here or on our SoundCloud account or iTunes account. Please share them far and wide!
Many of the comments I personally received about the Detroit meeting were that people felt reinvigorated—and that’s saying a lot after several days of moving between sessions, venues, and dozens of conversations. I hope the meeting was relevant and lively for you, too, and that I will see you in Austin, Texas, for next year’s conference! Our theme will be “I AM History.” The call for proposals will be posted soon on the Austin 2017 webpage.
Please let me, the AASLH staff, or the Program Committee know if you have suggestions for the next conference
Best regards,
John Dichtl
President & CEO
American Association for State and Local History
Half of the AASLH staff at the Awards Banquet
