At its meetings in Washington, D.C., June 6 and 7, 2009, the AHA’s Council reached the following decisions:

• Approved the minutes of the Council meetings held on January 2 and 5, 2009.
• Unanimously approved nominations of Paul Freedman (Yale Univ.), Jane Kamensky (Brandeis Univ.), Jeremy Popkin (Univ. of Kentucky), and Ruth Rogaski (Vanderbilt Univ.) to the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review.
• Unanimously approved a one-year delay in providing open access to articles in the American Historical Review.
• Approved the nominations of Saul Friedlander and Leon Litwack for the Awards for Scholarly Distinction, and of Romila Thapar for the Honorary Foreign Membership.
• Unanimously approved the establishment of an Equity Award.
• Unanimously approved suspension of two affiliates (Ukrainian Historical Association and International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions) that have not responded to requests for updates for more than four years.
• Approved appointment of the following as members of the 2011 Program Committee: J. D. (Jerome) Bowers (Northern Illinois Univ.); W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Alison Games (Georgetown Univ.); Valerie A. Kivelson (Univ. of Michigan); Ghislaine E. Lydon (UCLA); Lary L. May (Univ. of Minnesota); Peter C. Perdue (Yale Univ.); Bonnie Smith (Rutgers Univ.-New Brunswick); Andrea L. Stanton (New York Univ.); Charles Walker (Univ. of California at Davis). Council had previously approved the appointments of chair Michael Fisher (Oberlin Coll.) and co-chair Barbara Rosenwein (Loyola Univ. Chicago).
• Approved minor revisions to the Annual Meeting Guidelines, clarifying eligibility requirements for participants in formal sessions and the criteria for designating teaching sessions on the program.
• Unanimously approved the 2009–10 budget.
• Unanimously approved new procedures for the appointment of AHA delegates to external commissions, committees, and other groups. Future appointments of delegates will be made by the AHA Executive Committee instead of the Committee on Committees.
• Approved the establishment of an advisory committee on technology to advise on future technology initiatives and to bring the Association’s web site up-to-date.
• Approved changes to the annual meeting press policy, allowing press representatives to obtain written permission from speakers onsite rather than in advance.
• Directed staff to prepare a set of parameters for establishing special interest sections in the Association.
• Approved a new prize policy, clarifying the eligibility of deceased nominees. The new policy (which comes into effect with the next cycle of awards) reads:
  • Only living persons are eligible for awards to recognize scholarly or professional distinction (Anderson, Asher, Beveridge Family, Feis, Honorary Foreign Member, Roelker, Roosevelt-Wilson, and Scholarly Distinction); however, if the honoree dies after selection but prior to awarding at the upcoming annual meeting, the award can be made posthumously. Eligibility for book prizes, the Gilbert Award, and the O’Connor Film Award are governed by period of publication of the book, article, or film.