OAH Executive Board
21-22 October 2000
Baltimore, Maryland

At its 2000 fall meeting the OAH Executive Board took the following actions:

  • Approved the minutes of the 30 March to 2 April 2000 Executive Board meeting in St. Louis, Missouri.
  • Approved the minutes of the 31 May 2000 budget meeting, held by conference call after the Executive Board's spring meeting in St. Louis.  The budget was handled separately from other business because the board deemed it wise to delay its discussion until after the annual meeting when the impact of the convention and the Adam's Mark controversy was clearer. During the budget meeting conference call the board voted to adopt the 2000-2001 budget as proposed.
  • Endorsed the executive office's expanded proposal for a summer institute, to be cosponsored by Indiana University, that would address the issue of minority recruitment in the historical profession.
  • Thanked the OAH's MRC2000 Program Committee; Alan I Marcus, chair of the committee; George McJimsey, chair of the Iowa State University History Department; and Iowa State University for the success of the Midwestern Regional Conference in August.
  • Approved OAH working with the American Historical Association and the National Council for the Social Studies in planning a national biennial teaching conference beginning in summer 2002.
  • Authorized the creation of a new dissertation research prize in transnational history to be awarded for each of the next two years in the amount of  $1,250.  The new prize is a result of the Internationalizing the Study of American History conferences that took place at La Pietra in Florence, Italy, during the past few summers, a joint project of OAH and New York University. Subsequently, an anonymous donation made possible a third year of the new dissertation prize. The final La Pietra Report is available at <http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/>.
  • Authorized the creation of new dissertation research prizes for the study of 17th-century Jamestown in the amount of $5,000. The new prizes are a result of the cooperative agreement between OAH and the National Park Service. (See call for proposals on page 14.)
  • Made the following changes to the Foreign Language Book Prize: The award will be made in alternate years with a fixed award of $1,000 to the author and assistance in finding someone to translate the book; and an abstract of the book will be published in the OAH Newsletter.
  • Discussed proposals from the new ad hoc Development Committee for a major fundraising and endowment campaign focusing on OAH's national role as a society for history education.
  • Approved a set of guidelines to be used by executive office staff in selecting annual meeting sites, as well as specific language regarding discrimination lawsuits to be used in contracts with hotels for the annual meeting.
  • Chose Boston as the 2004 annual meeting city, and New York for 2008.  The board also narrowed the list of potential meeting sites for 2005 in the West, 2006 in the Southeast, and 2007 in the Central region.
  • Board members agreed to deliver lectures and to urge other participants in the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program to make engagements as speakers in the Los Angeles area immediately before and after the OAH Annual Meeting there next April.  In addition, board members invited lecturers and members taking part in the conference to coordinate with the executive office visits to Los Angeles high schools, colleges, and other institutions as guest speakers in the spirit of the meeting's theme, "Connections: Broadening Our Audiences".