The presidential address is one of the freer forms of professional communication currently in use in the American academic community. One can get a glimpse of freedom of the form by briefly perusing the presidential messages published in various historical journals over the past five or so years. A president may, like William Bouwsma, touch on a current in his own specialty because it is of “considerable importance for historians and for the larger culture of which we are a part.” And, using his own expertise in Renaissance history, he proceeded to identify changes in Renaissance historiography, with the larger theme of “the collapse of the traditional dramatic organization of Western history.” Other options which have been exercised by historian presidents include the challenge to improve teaching offered by Gilbert C. Fite to his colleages in the Southern Historical Association or the consideration of the effects of the federal government on all aspects of the historical profession offered by Richard W. Leopold to the Organization of American Historians.

The work of William Heard Kilpatrick (1871–1965) in the area of race and ethnic relations presents an opportunity to explore how one of the foremost educators of his time responded to a difficult and potentially dangerous aspect of American life. A consistent spokesman for New South approaches to racial injustice and a key member of the early intercultural education movement, he was also an influential officer of the New York Urban League in its formative years. Indeed, Kilpatrick's example as a pioneer in these affairs provides insight into the “liberal pluralist” outlook which came to prevail in American education for almost forty years, an outlook which only recently has come under scrutiny and criticism by scholars of race relations and ethnicity.

Herodes Atticus (A.D. 101–176), the Athenian millionaire, Roman consul, celebrated sophist and friend and teacher of Roman Emperors was one of the best known figures of the Antonine Period. Philostratus, the author of the Lives of the Sophists, written ca. A.D. 230, gives Herodes considerably more space than any other sophist; he is the subject of Graindor's solid though dated biography, of Rutledge's admirable doctoral thesis, and is one of the major figures in Bowersock's brilliant work on the Greek sophists in the Roman Empire. Herodes' education and teaching career, however, have never been adequately studied. It is the aim of this essay to do that.