Through email conversation from January 24, 2019, to May 30, 2019, and at meetings on June 8 and 9, 2019, the Council of the American Historical Association took the following actions:

• Sent a letter to Coalition S expressing concerns about potential damage to scholarly publishing in history caused by its open access mandate.

• Sent a letter to the leadership of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to reaffirm the Association’s support for the academy and to caution against reforms that would subject academy funding to approval from ministerial authorities.

• Sent a letter to Mayor John O’Reilly of Dearborn, Michigan, protesting the dismissal of Bill McGraw, editor of the city’s historical commission’s journal, for publishing an article about Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism.

• Appointed Lilly Tuttle (Museum of the City of New York) and Andrew Needham (New York Univ.) to co-chair the Local Arrangements Committee for the 2020 annual meeting in New York.

• Sent an action alert to AHA members in California urging them to contact their representatives to protest the California State University system’s proposal to reduce the required general education credit hours of US history and government courses. 

• Signed on to a letter from a group of scholarly associations to the Alaska governor and the state’s three legislators in the US Congress cautioning against proposed higher education budget cuts in the state.

• Approved the following changes proposed by the Committee on Minority Historians to the Equity Awards’ submission requirements: reduced the cover letter word count from 1,000 to 750 words, eliminated the need for reference letters, added a requirement to include the contact information of at least three references, and added a requirement of a short CV for nominations for the individual award.

• Approved affiliate status for the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions.

• Endorsed the bipartisan bill HR 1923, the Women’s History and 19th Amendment Centennial Quarter Dollar Coin Program Act, to establish a program featuring women on coinage starting in 2021 to coincide with the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

• Signed on to a letter from the Coalition for International Education endorsing S. 342, the Advancing International and Foreign Language Education Act, a bipartisan bill reintroduced this year by Senators Todd Yong (R-IN) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI).

• Signed on to a letter from the American Philosophical Association and the American Sociological Association to protest Brazil’s plans to cut philosophy and sociology programs.

• Sent a letter to the Stanford University president and provost regarding the university’s continued support for Stanford University Press.

• Sent a letter to the president, provost, and board chair at the University of Tulsa, urging the university administration to reconsider its restructuring plan for the humanities disciplines. 

• Signed on to a letter from the Coalition for International Education in support of federal funding efforts for the 2020 Title VI and Fulbright-Hays programs’ budgets.

• Approved the minutes of the January 2019 Council meeting.

• Approved the interim minutes of the Council from January through May 2019.

• Reappointed AHA parliamentarian Kenneth Ledford (Case Western Reserve Univ.).

• Appointed Richard Immerman, chair (Temple Univ.), Matthew Connolly (Columbia Univ.), Edna Medford (Howard Univ.), Chris Prom (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), and Leslie Rowland (Univ. of Maryland, Coll. Park) to the ad hoc committee to monitor activities at the National Archives and Records Administration.

• Sent a letter to the president of Guatemala protesting the government’s intention to close the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional.

• Authorized the AHA president to appoint a representative for the CIA’s Historical Review Panel.

• Selected the recipients of the 2019 Awards for Scholarly Distinction (to be announced in fall 2019).

• Designated three members of the Council to consider whether to recommend that the AHA should explore issues relating to broadening definitions of historical scholarship.

• Approved maintaining the existing designation for the Bernadotte Schmitt fund, which supports research grants in the history of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

• Approved adding the AHA to the list of signatories of a friend-of-the-court brief in support of plaintiffs challenging the Trump administration’s near-total ban on transgender individuals’ service in the military. 

• Established the AHA Policy on Revoking Prizes and Awards.

• Approved changes to the AHA Prizes Policy.

• Amended the AHA bylaws regarding procedures for the appointment and reappointment of the American Historical Review editor to reflect the 2018 elimination of the requirement that the editor of the AHR must be a faculty member at Indiana University.

• Clarified the role of the Research Division in its oversight of AHA publications in the Organization, Jurisdiction, and Operation of Association Divisions and Committees document.

• Declined to revise AHA constitutional clause requiring committee members to be members of the Association.

• Decided that official candidate biographies and statements are the only allowable platforms for candidate communications within the AHA web space.

• Appointed Sophia Rosenfeld, chair (Univ. of Pennsylvania); Paula Alonso (George Washington Univ.), Latin America; Sandra Greene (Cornell Univ.), Africa; Josh Piker (Coll. of William and Mary), US; and Anand Yang (Univ. of Washington), Asia, to the search committee for the editor of the AHR.

• Appointed Ana-Lucia Araujo (Howard Univ.), at large; Sunil Amrith (Harvard Univ.), South Asia; Rafe Blaufarb (Florida State Univ.), modern Europe; Keely Stauter-Halsted (Univ. of Illinois, Chicago), Russia/eastern Europe; Yoav Di-Capua (Univ. of Texas, Austin), Middle East; and Antoinette Burton (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), theory/methods, to three-year terms on the AHR Board of Editors.

• Appointed Farid Azfar (Swarthmore Coll.), early modern Europe; Julio Capó (Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst), modern US; Seth Cotlar (Willamette Univ.), early America; Rohan Deb Roy (Univ. of Reading), South Asia; and Dominique Reill (Univ. of Miami), modern Europe, to serve three-year terms as AHR associate review editors.

• Approved the fiscal year 2020 operating and capital budgets.

• Approved an up to 2 percent increase in institutional membership rates for the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years.

• Authorized the use of an additional $100,000 to pay for remaining capital headquarters renovation expenses, if needed.

• Approved changes to the Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, which identify intentional misgendering as a form of harassment.

• Approved a Guide for Dealing with Online Harassment and authorized AHA staff to add examples or links to the guide as needed.

• Approved elimination of the Job Center at the annual meeting.

• Adopted the Guidelines for First-Round Interviews to replace the AHA’s previous policies, Guidelines for the Hiring Process and Telephone and Video Interviews for the Academic Job Market.

• Updated the AHA’s Statement on Right to Engage in Collective Bargaining to include “all historians,” not only academic employees.

• Adopted the Guidelines for Historians for the Professional Evaluation of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

• Extended the term of the Committee on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning an additional year to allow the committee to make recommendations for next steps and revise the committee charge.

• Approved the following AHA members to serve on the Program Committee for the 2021 annual meeting in Seattle: Yigit Akin (Tulane Univ.), Middle East, Islamic world; Robert Batchelor (Georgia Southern Univ.), digital, modern Britain, East Asia and Pacific; Monique Bedasse (Washington Univ.), Africa, Caribbean; Keisha Blain (Univ. of Pittsburgh), US, African diaspora, gender; Cristobal Borges (North Seattle Coll.),Latin America, US; Cary Collins (Tahoma Senior High School), US, Native American, Pacific Northwest; Emily Greenwald (Historical Research Associates), public history, environmental, Native American; Carina Johnson (Pitzer Coll.), Europe, medieval/early modern; Laura Matthew (Marquette Univ.), Latin America, migration; Ritika Prasad (Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte), South Asia, science, decolonization; Gautham Rao (American Univ.),US, early Republic, legal; and Robert Weinberg (Swarthmore Coll.), Russia, eastern Europe, Jewish. These members join 2021 Program Committee chair Jared Poley (Georgia State Univ.), modern Europe, Germany, intellectual, and co-chair Lisa Brady (Boise State Univ.), 19th-century US, environmental, military.

• Adopted the Code of Professional Conduct at Officially Sanctioned AHA Activitiesto replace and expand the AHA’s previous Sexual Harassment Policy.