We are looking for a chair and commentator for the Organization of American Historians (OAH) Annual Meeting in San Francisco on April 11-14, 2013. (For more information please see: http://annualmeeting.oah.org/call_for_proposals/2013_sanfrancisco.html ). The conferences theme is “Entangled Histories: Connections, Crossings, and Constraints in U.S. History.” To that end, we have assembled a panel that focuses upon commemorations and celebrations in the American West that allowed participants to transcend racialized and gendered boundaries while working within confining stereotypes.

Two of us, Sarah McCormick Seekatz and Chelsea Vaughn, are currently PhD students in Public History at the University of California, Riverside. Sarah's paper, "Blind Date: The Cultivation of an Arabian Fantasy at Indio's National Date Festival" will focus on the Date Festival, where since 1921, locals and tourists to Indio, California have been "Playing Arab" in a manner similar to "playing Indian" and constructing an Arabian Fantasy Past that functioned in similar ways to the Spanish Fantasy Past so prevalent in Southern California. Through costume, architecture, parades, and pageants, the fair's craze for all things "Middle Eastern" reflected a troubled and imagined notion of the Middle East that experienced dramatic change over time. Chelsea’s paper, “Feminizing the West: Placing the Performance of Conquest into Familiar Forms,” examines the interplay of race and gender within historical pageantry in the West. Reaching the height of their popularity in the early twentieth century, many of these shows celebrated the conquest of the continent through the artistic tradition of rendering the colonial process within feminized forms. Through such familiar tropes as white women as markers of civilization and women of color as representations of conquered lands, pageant makers created easily recognizable allegorical imagery that had limited dependence upon the spoken word. The work of our third panelist, Dr. Molly Varley, assistant professor at Meredith College, focuses upon captivity narratives during the Progressive Era. Her paper, “The Captive’s Cabin: Indian Captive Dwelling as Sites of National Identity,” explores the manner through which one-time captive Abbie Gardner- Sharp recreated her home and herself as a relic of the frontier era for visitors willing to pay the price of admission.

If you are working on similar themes and would like to serve as chair and/or commentator for this panel please let us know as soon as possible as the deadline February 15, 2012 is quickly approaching! Please send an abstract and contact information to both Sarah (mccormicksarahanne@gmail.com) and Chelsea (chelseakristen@gmail.com).

Sincerely,
Sarah McCormick Seekatz (mccormicksarahanne@gmail.com)
Chelsea Vaughn (chelseakristen@gmail.com)