Looking for a speaker on a specific history subject for your next lecture series?

You might find what you need through the speakers bureaus offered by the Organization of American Historians and the American Studies Association. These two professional associations which work to support historical scholarship each offer a Distinguished Lectureship Program featuring several hundred historians and American studies scholars.

Both organizations' speakers bureaus help you to identify and invite outstanding historians to offer the latest and best in U.S. history research to your audience.

Lecture fees start at $1,000 plus travel and lodging expenses--not exactly a small ticket item for a local historical society, but not unreasonable considering that these include some of the most prominent historians in the country.

If you are considering using these speaker bureaus, I'd suggest planning well ahead. The bureaus are intended as fundraisers for their respective professional organizations. Each speaker listed has agreed to donate his or her fee to the sponsoring organization, but only commits to doing one lecture per year. To ensure that your first choice is available, you'll have to reserve early.

As a host institution, you'll also want to check whether a lecture and lecturer is suitable for your intended audience. Some of the topics can be a bit academic. For example "Transnational Feminist Studies: Problems and Possibilities" probably wouldn't play well for the Friday night wine and cheese crowd. But there are plenty of interesting and engaging lecture topics listed--everything from "A History of Marriage in America" to "Yiddish Heritage and the Jewish Role in American Popular Culture," and "Gilbert Stuart and George Washington."

Simply browsing the list of speakers and topics can be inspirational. In the course of reading the speakers' biographical statements to write this post, I discovered three new books that I want to read!

--Briann Greenfield