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  • Annual Report of the Secretary-Treasurer
  • Stephen Berry (bio)

Last year's annual meeting in Dallas marked the eighth time the Association has met in Texas and the second time in Dallas (1974). We have also met in Houston (2003, 1985, 1971, and 1957) and in Fort Worth (1999 and 1991).

Program Committee chairs Daniel C. Littlefield and Mark M. Smith worked with President John B. Boles and Local Arrangements Committee chair Stephanie Cole to put together a stellar opening plenary on Texas as a demographic, social, and political bellwether for the South. Other notable features of the program included President Boles's retrospective on his thirty-year tenure as editor of the Journal of Southern History; a panel, sponsored by the Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, amusingly titled, "How Many Committees Do I Have to Be On?: Strategies for Professional Advancement"; a roundtable, sponsored by the Committee on Minorities in the SHA, on the long history and future prospects of historically black colleges and universities; and the now traditional "Southern History in the Headlines" panel, which featured Jim Downs, Nell Irvin Painter, Karen L. Cox, and Marjorie J. Spruill and focused on Trumpism, women's rights, guns, and policing in the South. Darlene Clark Hine received a standing ovation in accepting the Association's John Hope Franklin Lifetime Achievement Award on Friday night. In recent years, the Association has also hosted a marquee event on Saturday evening; in Dallas we held a magnificently catered reception at the Sixth Floor Museum, cosponsored by Southern Methodist University and made possible by Stephanie Cole's creativity and fund-raising prowess. She and her committee set a fund-raising record in support of the Dallas meeting, and we should all be very grateful. The strength of both the program and the local arrangements was reflected in a strong number of conferees. Attendance in Dallas was 1,125—a robust showing for a meeting west of the Mississippi River. [End Page 413]

The Executive Council convened in Dallas on Wednesday, November 8, and welcomed aboard new Council members Nancy Bercaw, Craig Thompson Friend, and Joseph P. Reidy. Elisabeth Cawthon and Robert Smale joined in their first years as representatives of the European History Section and Latin American and Caribbean Section, respectively.

The Council had a relatively short agenda. Topics of note included the adoption of lowered annual membership rates for K–12 teachers ($15) and contingent faculty ($20); the commitment to explore the possibility of a joint meeting with the Western History Association in 2022; and the election of Edward E. Baptist, Gaines Foster, Cherisse Jones-Branch, and Randy J. Sparks to the Nominating Committee. (Lesley J. Gordon will continue over from last year to serve as chair.)

During the Council meeting, Journal editor Randal L. Hall reported two welcome developments. First, downloads of Journal content through our new Project Muse portal have been brisk, indicating a solid new revenue stream for the Association. Second, the Rice University history department has arranged to fund a sixth-year graduate student editing fellowship at the Journal; Rice has named the position the Boles Editing Fellow in honor of Journal editor emeritus John B. Boles.

The Association is now accepting nominations for one of its most significant awards: the John W. Blassingame Award for distinguished scholarship and/or mentorship in African American history. Committee members are Tera W. Hunter, Princeton University, chair; Raymond Arsenault, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg; and J. William Harris, University of New Hampshire. Letters of nomination should be sent to manager@thesha.org by June 1, 2018.

The SHA has upgraded its website, which now features a sleeker design and easier checkout process. Recurring memberships are now available for new members, and current members can switch to recurring to avoid the annual headache of renewal. Members can change their address (see thesha.org/update-your-address), and those who want to save trees or shelf space can now opt for a digital-only subscription to the Journal. The website's more sophisticated administrative backend also allows us to host affiliate websites, including the European History Section (thesha.org/ehs) and the Journal itself (thesha.org/jsh).

We are greatly...

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