SOURCE: “Hayden White (And the Content and the Form and Everyone Else) at the AHA,” in History and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 4, December, 1997, pp. 102–10.

In the following essay, Partner relates her observations and experiences during a January 1997 meeting of the American Historical Association devoted to the subject of Hayden White.

I had received the invitation to speak at the Humanities Center of Wesleyan University some weeks before the January meeting of the American Historical Association where I was going to read a paper at the session on the work of Hayden White organized by Richard Vann.¹ Since the choice of topic for this evening was entirely mine, I decided to do myself a favor and piggyback my Wesleyan paper on the AHA session—not by merely repeating that paper, which I had no intention of doing, but by using the experience to report on the “state of the art...