Through email communications from January 19 to May 13, 2023; at a teleconference meeting held on May 13, 2023; and at meetings on June 3 and 4, 2023, the Council of the American Historical Association took the following actions:

• Signed on to the American Anthropological Association statement Appointees to New College of Florida an Attack on Academic Integrity.
• Sent a letter to the US Department of State regarding the January 24 abduction of Professor Pierre Buteau, president of the Société Haïtienne d’Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie. Buteau was released by his captors on February 1, 2023.
• Appointed Joel Christenson (Historical Office, Office of the US Secretary of Defense) to the 2024 Program Committee.
• Approved Emily Callaci (Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison) as a consulting editor for the American Historical Review’s History Unclassified section.
• Signed on to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Statement in Support of Academic Freedom and New College of Florida.
• Revised the criteria for the new publication prize in Middle East history (approved by Council in January 2023) by inserting “since the seventh century.”
• Sent a letter to the US Department of State in support of Marc Fogel, a history teacher imprisoned in Russia.
• Signed on to an ACLS statement opposing Florida House Bill 999.
• Approved the Statement Opposing Florida House Bill 999, “express[ing] horror . . . at the assumptions that lie at the heart of this bill and its blatant and frontal attack on principles of academic freedom and shared governance central to higher education in the United States.”
• Revised AHA Bylaw 4, pursuant to Article IV, Section 6(3)(a)(i) and (c)(i), removing the requirement that at least one member of the executive director review or search committee should be a “resident in the Washington, DC, area” and “familiar with the work of scholarly associations.” In the case of the review committee, a member must also be familiar with “the advocacy work of the Association and its relationship to wider contexts.”
• Revised AHA Bylaw 4, pursuant to Article IV, Section 6(5) and (6), to reflect recent changes in the operational structure of the American Historical Review and clarifying the process for the appointments of associate review editors and consulting editors for the journal.
• Approved LIG Association Health Program as a member benefit. The program will provide AHA members with the opportunity to purchase medical, dental, and other types of personal insurance.
• Sent a letter to San Francisco State University expressing concern regarding its “investigation” of Professor Maziar Behrooz for showing a drawing of the prophet Muhammad in his course on the history of the Islamic world between 500 and 1700.
• Approved appointment of the following members of the American Historical Review Board of Editors, to begin three-year terms in August 2023: Erika Edwards (Univ. of Texas at El Paso); Inger Leemans (Univ. of Amsterdam); Melani McAlister (George Washington Univ.); Crystal Moten (Obama Presidential Center Museum); Shailaja Paik (Univ. of Cincinnati); Kennetta Hammond Perry (Northwestern Univ.); Bianca Premo (Florida International Univ.); Sherene Seikaly (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara); and Benjamin Talton (Howard Univ.).
• Approved the Statement Opposing the Exclusion of LGBTQ+ History in Florida.
• Approved the minutes of the January 2023 Council meetings.
• Approved the minutes of the March 2023 teleconference.
• Approved the interim minutes of the Council from January through May 2023.
• Approved the creation of two ad hoc committees: one on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on history education, and another on the impact of AI on research and publications.
• Appointed the following members to the 2025 Program Committee: Yingcong Dai (William Paterson Univ.); Christine Eubank (Bergen Community Coll.); Annie Polland (Tenement Museum); John T. R. Terry (Westminster Schools); and Baki Tezcan (Univ. of California, Davis).
• Appointed Mary Ann Irwin (California State Univ., East Bay) and Felicia Angeja Viator (San Francisco State Univ.) as co-chairs for the Local Arrangements Committee for the 2024 annual meeting.
• Approved the Finance Committee’s recommendation to consolidate the remaining funds in the Oxford Portfolio funds with the AHA’s main portfolio with TIAA Investments.
• Approved the FY 2024 budget.
• Approved a 3 percent increase for the rates of most membership categories.
• Approved increasing the rate of a life membership to $4,000.
• Approved the nominees for the 2023 Awards for Scholarly Distinction (to be announced in October).
• Approved the nominee for the 2023 Tikkun Olam Prize (to be announced in October).
• Approved changes to the Guidelines for First Round Interviews to clarify the AHA’s position against the recording of interviews without permission.
• Approved the removal of all references to an outdated 2007 American Association of University Professors statement from the Guidelines for Academic Job Offers.
• Approved replacing all references to “thesis” with “dissertation” in the Guidelines for Advising the Doctoral Dissertation Process.
• Approved archiving the statement on Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian, which was superseded by the Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship.
• Approved the creation of two ad hoc committees, one on peer review and the other on scholarly journal publishing.