David Hammack, the Hiram C. Haydn Professor of History, delivered a plenary address at the annual conference for the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), the leading international organization for researchers in its field, in November.
In his speech, Hammack celebrated the life and work of Peter Dobkin Hall, who died in an accident this past spring. Hall was an early leader of ARNOVA. Hammack first got involved in the organization after Hall visited Case Western Reserve University in the 1980s to celebrate an anniversary of Cleveland’s Federation for Community Planning (now the Center for Community Solutions).
After Hall’s death, ARNOVA decided to devote a plenary session of its annual research conference to consideration of the uses of history.
Hammack was invited to give the opening statement, touching on Hall’s work and the broad implications of historical research for the applied social sciences.
A full transcription of Hammack’s talk is available online at histphil.org/2015/11/23/reflections-on-history-and-arnova/.