Your headquarters staff is basking in the afterglow of the Chicago annual meeting. All but two members of the staff were present at the Chicago Hyatt Regency for at least four days. Kept hopping, they rarely were able to get outside its East and West Towers.
Thanks to a first-class hotel staff and a fine Local Arrangements Committee, the logistics of the annual meeting went very smoothly. The turn-out was impressive, since 3,077 historians were registered, a 10 percent increase over the 1984 Chicago annual meeting.
As those present at the business meeting of the Association were told on December 29, the Association is in good health. We anticipate a third successive year of balanced budgeting, our membership has increased by 353 over the previous year, to just under 13,000, and we have held the line on our dues structure for the fourth year in a row. This keeps us one of the lowest priced social science and humanities organizations. We have been informed of a generous bequest from the estate of our 1960 president, Bernadotte Schmitt, which is expected to add well over a hundred thousand dollars to our endowment.
Historians, like owls, frequently have their heads swiveled round to stare fixedly at the past, but we sometimes get involved in the future as well. Dr. Allen Weinstein, President of the Center for Democracy, and Dr. David Challinor, Assistant Secretary for Research of the Smithsonian Institution, chaired a major conference December 4–6 at the Air and Space Museum on “Governance in Future Space Communities: First Principles,” in which headquarters staff participated. The conference is marking the bicentenary of the US Constitution by focusing on constitutional principles that should inform and regulate the governance of future space settlements. The AHA’s principal suggestion was to focus the conference’s attention on the Mayflower Compact, which has potent analogies for the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
On December 11 representatives of the Finance Committee of the Council held the annual meeting in New York City with the Association’s trustees prescribed by our constitution. Under that constitution, these five generous and public-spirited financial professionals give of their time and expertise for the care and nurture of our modest permanent funds and endowments. In the bull market of the past two years, their wizardry, ever following prudent investment strategies, has done wonders for us. Our financial agent since 1932 has been Fiduciary Trust Company of New York, which puts into effect the trustees’ investment and reinvestment decisions within a policy framework laid down by the Council.
On December 17 the joint bicentennial committee of the American Political Science and American Historical associations held its annual meeting to pro vide continuing direction to Project ’87, our bicentennial commemoration undertaking, which is now at a crescendo. The committee approved plans to wind up the formal Project ’87 effort in the summer of 1988, heard reports on the many publications, films, and outreach programs under way, and rejoiced in the success of the outstanding series of poster exhibits developed by a task force under the leadership of Dr. Joan Challinor. The decision was taken to keep the exhibit series at a rock bottom price to maximize the distribution of the posters and their users’ guide.
