Peter Janssen, a vice president at Macmillan, set up a display yesterday at the American Historical Association convention at the Manchester Grand Hyatt. Photograph: Eduardo Contreras

From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Historians embroiled in present-day battle

Presentation on marriage planned at boycotted hotel

By John Wilkens, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 12:23 a.m.

Professional historians usually concern themselves with the past, but this week in San Diego they’ll be immersed in one of the most contentious issues of the present — same-sex marriage.

The annual convention of the 125-year-old American Historical Association, held here for the first time, will feature a 15-session “mini-convention” on various aspects of matrimony, including how its definition has evolved through time.

These free meetings, which start today and are open to the public, came about because of where the convention is being held — the Manchester Grand Hyatt on San Diego’s waterfront.

The 1,625-room resort has been the subject of a boycott by gay-rights activists since July 2008. They targeted the hotel after its owner, developer Doug Manchester, contributed $125,000 to Proposition 8, the successful ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage in California.

To prepare for its 2010 conference, the historical association reserved space at the hotel in 2003. A year ago — two months after Proposition 8 had passed — some of the group’s members asked that the boycott be honored.

But canceling would have cost almost $800,000 in reservation fees and penalties, said Arnita Jones, the association’s executive director. “We’ve been around a long time, but our members are college professors, history teachers and librarians, and we aren’t a wealthy organization,” she said.

The board instead voted for the addition of a mini-convention and authorized spending up to $100,000 to support it.

“Historians aren’t policymakers and they don’t tell people what to do, but they can provide context, give us depth and help people see that they aren’t the first generation to be troubled by this issue,” said association President Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian from Harvard University.

Backers of the boycott said they have mixed feelings about the gathering of historians and the conference within a conference. They plan to demonstrate on Saturday afternoon at the hotel, as they’ve done during other conventions.

“I love the fact that they are reaching out and discussing the issue,” said Fred Karger, head of Californians Against Hate. “I just wish they would do it anywhere else but at the Manchester. It’s a real slap in the face to the gay community.”

He noted that the association also reserved blocks of rooms in other local hotels. “If they’re sincere in their efforts, they should hold those sessions at one of the other venues,” he said.

Jones said moving the presentations off-site was considered, “but the leadership didn’t want to divide the meeting or isolate the work on marriage as something that’s not mainstream history.”

She said that some of the association’s members have declined to attend because of the boycott, “but we’ve had a great many more comments from those who support what we’ve done.”

Karger and Cleve Jones, another prominent gay-rights activist, said they believe the boycott has been a success, pointing to several organizations that have canceled events there. They said it has cost the hotel at least $7 million.

But Kelly Commerford, director of marketing for the Manchester Grand Hyatt, said occupancy has remained strong despite the controversy and the struggling economy.

“Really, this so-called boycott has had limited impact on the hotel,” he said.

Arnita Jones, who has served as executive director of the historical association for 11 years, said she’s unaware of her group ever doing something similar at its annual convention, which is expected to draw about 4,000 historians through Sunday.

The conference will feature dozens of presentations on diverse topics such as oceans, Helen Keller, Google, Charles Darwin, peyote and vampires.

“The leadership wanted to do more than just say ‘no’ to the boycott,” Jones said. “They began thinking that the conversation in California could benefit from some historical research that’s been done on the family in general and marriage in particular over the last couple decades.”

A call for papers led to sessions on a range of issues including medieval marriage; the influence of governments, churches and communities on marriage restrictions; the politics of marriage in early America; and interethnic marriage.

A central theme emerging from all the research is that there may be no such thing as “traditional” marriage, Ulrich said.

“Which tradition?” she said. “Whose tradition?”

Her specialty is colonial America, and it was the New England Puritans who made one of the first major changes in marriage, turning it from a purely religious ceremony into a civil one.

“Because it was a contract, it could be broken,” Ulrich said. “It wasn’t common, and it wasn’t easy, but it was now possible in a way it hadn’t been before. That’s something that amazes people with certain stereotypes about the Puritans.”

She pointed to more recent changes, including a 1949 California Supreme Court decision that ended bans on marriage between people of different racial backgrounds.

“We can argue about what marriage should be today,” Ulrich said. “But we cannot argue that marriage has always been the same.”

The American Historical Association is the largest and oldest group of its kind in the country, with 14,000 members.

They include college professors, graduate students, primary-school teachers and historians at museums, libraries and archives.

John Wilkens: (619) 293-2236; john.wilkens@uniontrib.com