At its meeting held June 5–6, 2004, in Washington, D.C., the AHA Council:

•  Approved minutes of the meetings held on January 8th and 11th, 2004, in Washington, D.C.
•  Approved nominees for the 2004 Awards for Scholarly Distinction (which will be announced at the 2005 annual meeting in Seattle).
•  Approved the nomination for the recipient of the second Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service.
•  Approved the fiscal 2004–05 Budget.
•  Approved the Program Committee for the 2006 annual meeting:
  
  

  • Celia Applegate (Univ. of Rochester) and Kären Wigen (Stanford Univ.), co-chairs

  • Gary Gerstle (Univ. of Maryland, College Park), Dena Goodman (Univ. of Michigan), Claudio Lomnitz (New School), Nancy McTygue (Vacaville High School, California), Patricia Ann Palmieri (Fashion Institute of Technology/SUNY), Patricia Pelley (Texas Tech Univ.), Stephen Rapp (Georgia State Univ.), Ray Smock (Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies); and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Indiana Univ.).

  • [Note: after the co-chairs of the 2007 Program Committee are selected by the president-elect for 2005 (who is elected in November 2004), they will also serve as members of the 2006 Program Committee.]
    

• Approved selection of Maureen Murphy Nutting as the chair of the Local Arrangements for the 2005 Annual Meeting.
• Agreed to join JSTOR in submitting an amicus curiae brief on behalf of National Geographic Society in the legal case Faulkner v. National Geographic, 294 F. Supp. 523 (S.D.N.Y. 2003).
•  Discussed—and agreed with the tenor of—the Professional Division’s preliminary draft revisions to the Statement on Standards and Professional Conduct.
•  Requested all AHA committees to revisit their mission statements every three years and to work with Council to establish their long-term agendas.
• Approved changes to the Annual Meeting Guidelines, including new procedures for submitting proposals, and agreed to the concept of slowly expanding the number of sessions.
• Requested the Research Division to write a statement on the importance of peer review.
• Approved a new document specifying Fiduciary Trust International as the financial managers of the AHA, to replace the original document lost in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.
• Approved the Teaching Division’s plans for implementing the Committee on Graduate Education’s report Education for Historians for the Twenty-first Century.
• Approved the American Historical Review’s new members to the Board of Editors:
  
  

  • Norman Naimark (Stanford Univ.), eastern Europe
  • Kathleen Canning (Univ. of Michigan), modern Europe
  • Vanessa R. Schwartz (Univ. of Southern California), historical methods
  • Leila Fawaz (Tufts Univ.), world history.

•  Approved re-revised mission statement for the Committee on Women Historians.
• Approved audiotaping of the Business Meeting at the Annual Meeting for if needed for record keeping. The tapes will not be released and will be destroyed after one year.
• Directed the AHA Executive Committee to prepare a statement on the nomination and approval process for the Archivist for the United States.
• Endorsed statement reiterating support for the federal Office of Human Research Protection’s exclusion of oral history from Institutional Review Board (IRB) oversight (see page 10).
• Approved change to bylaw to the AHA constitution to allow electronic balloting in AHA elections. The new bylaw states:

13. Bylaw pursuant to Article VII, section 5; Article VIII, section 2–4; and Article X: Mail ballots authorized by the Constitution and Bylaws may be circulated by standard or electronic means.

• Endorsed a contract between the Library of Congress and the AHA regarding processing and storage of, and access to, the AHA archives housed in the library’s facilities.
• Recommended the creation of a web site task force to aid in the transition to the new AHA web site.