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Dear Colleagues,I attended several days of this year’s American Historical Association meeting in Atlanta.  There were, as always, a wide variety of sessions and many stimulating papers, but I was struck by how few of them concerned French history. I’ve just gone through the entire program, which lists something like 850 papers, and I could only identify twelve individual talks dealing with any aspect of our subject (including the French empire); there were no sessions focused on French history and only one that mentioned France in its title—and even there, we were connected with a hyphen to our Spanish neighbors.  No session had more than one paper concerning France.  Contrary to what some people believe, the AHA’s program guidelines do not require that all panels be transnational, and there were a fair number of sessions on the history of single countries (not counting the US, which, as usual, plays by its own rules).  Among the countries that had panels to themselves were Italy, Guatemala, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, and even places that no longer exist—I’m talking about you, Austro-Hungarian Empire!Should we be concerned about this?  It is obviously a good thing that the AHA program has become so much more diverse than it was in the past, and achieving this diversity has necessarily implied a reduction in the number of papers and sessions on “traditional” topics.  Of course we have our own wonderful annual meetings—SFHS, WSFH, FCHS—where we get to enjoy being with others who share our special interests.Nevertheless, the AHA is still, in spite of everything, our discipline’s largest and most important annual meeting. It’s a showcase where every part of the historians’ community has a chance to make its presence known.   I fear that the relative invisibility of French history at this year’s meeting may have sent an unfortunate message.  If I were a department chair trying to decide whether to argue with my dean about hiring a French historian, or a university press editor wondering whether to accept a new manuscript in French history, or a graduate student weighing the prospects of getting a job, I might have concluded that other fields show more promise.The deadline for proposals for the 2017 AHA program in Denver, Colorado, is February 15.  I’d certainly encourage colleagues to put in proposals.  We all know that there are lots of scholars in French history whose work, properly presented, would be very interesting to folks in other areas of history.  Allons-y!Jeremy Popkin, University of Kentucky