As is its custom, the Council met twice, once before and once during the annual meeting in Chicago, taking action on a number of important issues on its agenda.
An important decision taken by the Council, on the recommendation of the Teaching Division, was to authorize the commencement of an award for outstanding teaching. The Association now has eighteen book prizes, which recognize excellence in research and writing, but until now it has had no analogous award for teaching. The procedure, approved by the Council, will be to ask each winner of a 1987 AHA book prize (Adams, Beer, Beveridge, Dunning, Birdsall, Breasted, Fairbank, Feis, Gershoy, Kelly, Littleton-Griswold, Marraro, and Robinson) to nominate a teacher at the secondary or postsecondary level, who by inspired teaching “turned on” the prize winner to the subject of history and to a career in history. Graduate-level teachers will be ineligible. The Teaching Division Committee will weigh all the nominations submitted and select an individual to receive a thousand dollar AHA prize at the next annual meeting.
The Council also approved the Research Division’s plan to produce a new edition of the Guide to Historical Literature, if the necessary financial resources can be found. It authorized President Natalie Davis to appoint an ad hoc committee on historians and film, and it named a delegate and alternates to the general assembly of the International Committee of the Historical Sciences, which meets next September in Greece. After a long discussion of the perennial subject of returning to a system of uncontested elections for the position of president-elect, the Council by consensus decided to take no action on the issue. It accepted the recommendation of the Nominating Committee that in the 1987 and subsequent elections the AHA return to the tried and true method of a separate mailing of the ballot and supporting material to all members. The experiment of the last two years, by which the election material and ballot were incorporated into the September issue of Perspectives, has seen significant declines in the percentage of voter response.
The Council named Professor Konrad Jarausch of the University of North Carolina to be chair of the 1988 Program Committee and requested him to put together a committee with appropriate field, geographic, and gender balance to be put before the spring Council meeting. The Council approved holding the 1988 annual meeting in Cincinnati, if appropriate agreements can be worked out with the convention center and hotels there.
On financial matters the Council, after hearing a report from past president Arthur Link, appropriated the sum of five thousand dollars for the support of a National Commission on the Social Studies, which is being organized upon the initiative of the National Council for the Social Studies. It took note with approval of the involvement of Professor Link and of representatives of the AHA’s Teaching Division in the project and of the importance of enhancing the role of history in the schools’ curriculum.
The Council voted to unify two separate investment accounts covering the Matteson Fund and the Association’s other permanent funds and endowments into a single account under the care of Fiduciary Trust Company of New York. The origin of the separate Matteson account dates back to the 1940s, and there is now no need for a separate investment portfolio.
Furthermore, the Council nominated and the business meeting of the membership later unanimously approved the reelection to a new five-year term of Trustee D. Roger B. Liddell of Alex Brown and Sons and the election, as a new Trustee, of R. Dyke Benjamin of Lazard Freres.
Other items of Council business included approval of a new affiliated society, the Alcohol and Temperance History Group, approval of a new bylaw governing periodic review of the Association’s appointed officers, and appointment of four new members of the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review, recommended by the Research Division Committee. Finally, the Council approved the numerous plans for closer cooperation with our affiliate in Italy, the Societa’ degli storici italiani and the plans for a joint conference on early modern Chinese history with the Japanese National Committee of Historians next summer.
