Fall 2002 OAH Executive Board Meeting: Baltimore, Maryland

At its 2002 fall board meeting at the Wyndham Baltimore Inner Harbor Hotel the OAH Executive Board took the following actions:

• Approved the minutes of the 11-14 April 2002 Executive Board meeting in Washington, D.C.
  
• Accepted $10,000 from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History for fifty teacher travel fellowships for the 2003 Memphis Annual Meeting, as well as additional assistance for improvement of the OAH Magazine of History and the OAH radio show, Talking History.
  
• Authorized the president to appoint a three-person committee to conduct the five-year review of Executive Director Lee Formwalt, who took office in October 1999.
  
• Accepted the nominee of the Distinguished Service Award Committee (David Montgomery, chair; Douglas Greenberg; Emma Lapsansky; and Gloria Miranda), who will receive the award at the 2003 Annual Meeting in Memphis.
  
• Charged the Distinguished Service Award Committee to present a proposal by the time of the next board meeting for creating a new OAH award in recognition of service to history and the historical profession by a non-historian.
  
• Renamed the Foreign Language Book Prize, created in 1994, the Willi Paul Adams Award for the Best Book on American History Published in a Foreign Language, and thanked Kathleen Conzen for offering to lead an endowment effort for the renamed prize.
  
• Discussed the report on Michael Bellesiles issued by Emory University and how this matter raises larger questions about trust and integrity in the scholarly process and the ways in which historical argument and interpretation are conducted. Agreed that the OAH should help these issues become the subject of wider discussion across the profession. The organization will use the OAH Newsletter as a vehicle for further consideration of the matter. In addition, sessions on the subject will be planned at upcoming annual meetings in Memphis and Boston in 2003 and 2004. The board will ask the editorial board of the Journal of American History to consider a commissioned essay or a roundtable to address the ethical issues of this and other recent cases and how much historians rely on trust in practicing their craft. Also agreed to continue this discussion at the next board meeting in April in Memphis.
  
• Approved another year of publications exchange with the National Council for History Education (NCHE), so that all NCHE members will receive the OAH Magazine of History and all OAH members will receive History Matters!
  
• Changed the David Thelen Prize for best article on American history published in a language other than English from an annual to a biennial prize.
  
• Approved the following locations for annual meetings: Washington, D.C., 2006; Minneapolis, 2007; and New York, 2008.
  
• Adopted a new cycle of annual meeting locations so that Washington, D.C., which is the site of the organization's most well-attended conferences, will be on the OAH schedule every four years.
  
• Agreed to meet jointly with the National Council on Public History every four years in Washington, D.C.
  

Subsequent to the meeting in Baltimore, the board took the following actions:

• Approved the appointment of Robert W. Cherny as OAH Treasurer for a five-year term beginning 6 April 2003, at the recommendation of the search committee composed of William Chafe, chair; Emily Rosenberg; and Robert Griffith.
  
• Authorized the president to appoint an ad hoc committee to review the organization's prize and award structure and to offer recommendations for standardizing/streamlining the creation, endowment, and annual processing of OAH prizes and awards.
  
• Approved several changes to the OAH bylaws regarding new and changes to existing prize and service committees. These changes will be brought before the membership at the Business Meeting during the 2003 Annual Meeting in Memphis (8:00 a.m., Sunday, 6 April).
  
• Authorized the president to appoint a three-person committee to draft a revision of the OAH Constitution and Bylaws in time for the organization's one hundredth anniversary in 2007.