Editor's Note: In accordance with the decision of the Council to make its deliberations as accessible to members of the AHA as possible, we will be publishing important decisions of the Council. At its May 1999 meeting the AHA Council took the following actions.

1. Approved the appointment of Iris Berger (State Univ. of New York at Albany), Michael Hogan (Ohio State Univ.), Brooke Larson (State Univ. of New York at Stony Brook), and Edward J. Muir Jr. (Northwestern Univ.) to the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review.

2. Agreed to extend the deadline to October 1 for nominations and applications for awards through the Gutenberg-e competition for fellowships facilitating the conversion of dissertations into electronic monographs.

3. Approved the 1999–2000 budget.

4. Approved AHA participation in development of a proposal, with the Association of American Colleges and Universities, for a project on "Shaping the Preparation of Future Humanities and Social Science Faculty."

5. Heard a report on membership figures and discussed the continuing low numbers of minority members in the AHA.

6. Agreed in principle to increase the price of institutional subscriptions for the AHR.

7. Approved electronic publication of an online directory of AHA members (note: only those members who have specifically approved their names being listed will be included) and deferred making a decision about a print version of the directory pending further information about costs.

8. Authorized AHR editor Michael Grossberg to continue negotiations with a university press about an electronic version of the AHR.

9. Approved the following members to serve on the 2001 Program Committee:

Michael Bernstein (Univ. of California at San Diego), Barbara Hanawalt (Ohio State Univ.), John Brackett (Univ. of Cincinnati), Janet Ewald (Duke Univ.), Charlotte Furth (Univ. of Southern California), Lisbeth Hass (Univ. of California at Santa Cruz), Philippa Levine (Univ. of Southern California), Daniel Orlovsky (Southern Methodist Univ.), Donald Quataert (State Univ. of New York at Binghamton), Paul Ropp (Clark Univ.), Anthony Rotundo (Phillips Acad.), Patricia Tracy (Williams Coll.), Barbara Weinstein (State Univ. of New York at Stony Brook).

10. Approved elimination of geographic rotation for the Breasted Prize so that all works dealing with history prior to A.D. 1000 will be considered annually.

11. Accepted an endowment for a new annual book prize in honor of George L. Mosse on European intellectual and cultural history encompassing central and eastern Europe.

12. Heard a report on a joint project with the Library of Congress and the Community College Humanities Association on "Globalizing Regional Studies." (The project, which began in July 1999, is supported by the Ford Foundation.)

13. Agreed to renew a contract with University Microfilms International for microfiche and microform reproductions of the AHR.

14. Agreed to rescind a requirement that annual meeting proposals should address the implication for teaching of papers being given and instead, to urge future program committees to draw the attention of panelists and commentators to the implications of papers for teaching.

15. Agreed to amend the Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, sec. 4 as follows:

Historians have an obligation to do all possible to ensure that (all) employment opportunities in the field are widely publicized and that all professionally qualified persons have an equal opportunity to compete for any openly advertised position. This change recognizes the reality that not all positions (e.g., targets of excellence, affirmative action, spousal hires, administrative transfers) are filled through open searches.

16. Agreed to modify the section on "Interviews at the AHA's Annual Meeting" of the current "Guidelines for Hiring Process" to read as follows:

Although the AHA recognizes that appropriately furnished parlors provide the ideal interviewing environment at annual meeting sites, the Association acknowledges that this is not always possible. If it is necessary for an institution to conduct interviews in a regular hotel room, the AHA strongly encourages interviewing institutions to ensure:

a. that the interviewing committee have both genders represented.

b. that there should be proper seating for job candidates and interviewers. No one should be seated on a bed. It is the institution's responsibility to contact the hotel in advance of the meeting to arrange for extra seating; it is the Association's responsibility to notify hotels that institutions will request banquet chairs and that they should be provided gratis.

c. that candidates and the Job Register staff are to be advised where the interviews will be held.

17.  Approved the following statement of terminology for c.v.'s for dissemination in Perspectives and inclusion in the Survival Manual revision:

"The status of a book or article that is in the publication pipeline is often an important piece of information to a search committee or fellowship review committee. Yet the profession has no standardized terminology, often rendering that status unclear. The AHA suggests the following lexicon:

"In Press": the publication is out of the author's hands. It lies somewhere in the production process.

"Forthcoming": the publication has been accepted by a press or journal. Author is making final revisions to a completed text.

"Under contract to...": a press and an author have signed a contract for a book in progress.

"Submitted" or "under consideration": the book or article has been submitted to a press or journal.

18. Approved the following resolution reauthorizing the Task Force on Graduate Education:

The American Historical Association recognizes graduate students as the future of the profession, and accordingly includes them as full participants in its proceedings. In recognition of their special needs as aspiring professionals, the AHA Council has created a Task Force on Graduate Education, chaired by its graduate student member, that is advisory to the Council. The Task Force's term is extended for three years, through May 2002. Graduate students shall serve as the majority of its membership. It is charged to monitor the policies of the Association, to disseminate information to the student members of the AHA, to solicit and focus the concerns of each generation of graduate students, and to make such recommendations to Council on behalf of graduate students of the Association. The AHA will grow in the future through the efforts of the graduate students of today and this investment now in the Association will open it to their own successors, the students of tomorrow.

19. Agreed to extend the Publications Advisory Committee for one year and authorized President Robert Darnton to appoint a review committee to evaluate the work of the PAC.

20. Agreed to cease publication of the Annual Report in its current form. The Smithsonian Institution, which formerly printed and published the AHA's Annual Report, no longer is able to do so. Staff are exploring alternative ways of meeting the requirements of the AHA's congressional charter to report annually to Congress.

21. Approved creation of a "design committee" to prepare a plan for an ad hoc task force on the crisis in graduate education and to explore possible funding sources for the task force.

22. Approved the creation of an ad hoc committee on part-time teaching.

23. Approved, on recommendation from the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, letters from President Darnton in support of the NEH budget request; an executive order establishing history offices throughout federal departments and agencies; and the re-establishment of the U.S. House of Representatives history office.