Conducted via e-mail from June 5, 2013 to December 15, 2013 and at the Council Meeting on January 2 and 5, 2014

Through e-mail conversation from June 5 to December 15, 2013, the Council of the American Historical Association made the following decisions:

• Approved the nomination of Derek Peterson, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, to serve as the final member of the 2015 Program Committee. Votes: 12 in favor, 0 against.
• Approved a statement encouraging universities to adopt a policy that permits recipients of the PhD to choose whether their completed dissertations should be immediately available for free download or be embargoed in digital form for a period of up to six years. This recommendation includes a provision that all dissertations should be available in some format.
• Issued a statement supporting the right of historians to select course assignments as an aspect of academic freedom, in response to the release of a series of 2010 e-mails from former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, in which Daniels denounced the use of Howard Zinn’s textbook in courses used to train precollegiate teachers.
• Approved the January 2013 Council Meeting Minutes.
• Approved the nomination of Patrick K. O’Brien, Centennial Professor of Economic History, London School of Economics, as the 2013 Honorary Foreign Member.
• Approved the nomination of David Rubenstein, Founder, Carlyle Group, as the recipient of the 2013 Roosevelt–Wilson Award.
• Adopted a resolution electing not to become subject to the District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation Act of 2010 (the “New Act”), to be filed with the District of Columbia Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs prior to January 1, 2014.

At the meeting of the Council of the American Historical Association, held January 2 and 5, 2014, in Washington, DC, the Council made the following decisions:

•  Approved the June 2013 Council Meeting Minutes.
• Approved the June–December 2013 Interim Council Meeting Minutes.
• Approved transfer of the oversight of the John E. O’Connor Film Award from the Teaching Division to the Research Division.
• Approved nominations from the Committee on Committees, which included 2014 committee appointments to various AHA prize and other committees.
• Approved George Sanchez, University of Southern California, as the AHA’s delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies through December 31, 2016.
• Approved the selection of the 2014 Honorary Foreign Member (to be announced at a later date).
• Received the annual audit for the 2013 fiscal year.
• Established an ad hoc Committee on Contingent Faculty to study and collect data on the existing population of contingent faculty and to examine the impact that working conditions have on the quality of history education and the quality of life for nontenure-track faculty.
• Established an ad hoc Committee on Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians, which will explore the landscape of digital scholarship and online communication and assess existing models for the integration of digital publications into the hiring, tenure, and promotion systems of history departments.
• Approved revisions to the Perspectives on History online gating policy to make freely available all web versions of articles in the newsmagazine from the date of publication. PDF and EPUB (or similar) versions of the newsmagazine will be available for download in the members-only section of the AHA website.
• Approved a resolution that new articles published in Perspectives on History, to which the AHA holds the copyright, will carry a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. The same license will be applied to previously published articles upon request by the author(s).
• Approved the elimination of the spousal membership rate category.
• Approved revisions to the Press Policy for the AHA Annual Meeting, requiring e-mail recording permissions to be submitted prior to the meeting.
• Approved a change to the William and Edwyna Gilbert Prize aligning the publication date eligibility requirements with the calendar year.
• Established the Dorothy Rosenberg Phi Beta Kappa Fellowships to subsidize graduate student travel and expenses for presenting their research at the AHA Annual Meeting.
• Approved the description of the Dorothy Rosenberg Prize, an award for the most distinguished work of scholarship on the history of the Jewish Diaspora published in English during the previous calendar year.
• Revised the eligibility guidelines for the Herbert Feis Award for Distinguished Contributions to Public History to include collaborative work.
• Approved an application for affiliation from the Association for Computers and the Humanities.

Keep an eye on AHA Today and the spring issues of Perspectives on History for the publication of the approved statements and reports, and updates on the various activities described above.