LACS\SHA Minutes, 2003

Houston

Richmond Brown, President:

• Thanks to Western Kentucky University for giving Andrew McMichael (Sec.-Tres.) a great deal of help in sending out notices

• Thanks also to SMU and Vanderbilt for sponsoring the reception and the Executive Committee meeting

• Prize announcements:

  • The Ralph Lee Woodward prize for graduate student paper presentation last year went to Barry Robinson of Vanderbilt

  • Our article prize last year went to Hal Langfur for "Uncertain Refuge: Frontier Formation and the Origins of the Botocudo War in Late Colonial Brazil," HAHR 82:2 (May 2002)

John Britton, Book Prize Committee chair:

• Strong field this year, but unanimous decision
• The winner is Alejandro de la Fuente. A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Andrew McMichael, Secretary-Treasurer:

• The SHA focuses on affiliate membership, and ours has gone from 10 to 53
• We will now be getting a teaching luncheon
• Our current fees are $16, $7 for affiliate, and $9 for LACS
• $9 is not enough, and the Executive Committee is proposing $20, $7 for graduate students
• We need money for the book and article prize money. For these prizes we need a $5000 endowment
• We need to get our membership to 100 for recertification with the SHA. The European section is at 95 and we need to be on par with them to increase panels, etc.
• SHA is talking to us about life membership. This provides quick cash, but it costs us money over lifetime. Also, if SHA raises affiliate rate, it could cost us money.
• The Executive Committee is talking about a newsletter. Several members want something on paper because they don't do e-mail

Motion: A motion was made to accept the Executive Committee's recommendation to raise fees to $20 for all members except graduate students, whose rate would be placed at $7. The motion was seconded, and carried without objection.

Jane Landers, Program Chair, 2004:

• We sent a call out to several H-Net lists and some organizations that had theri own lists. We wanted to broaden our membership. Our papers luckily match SHA goals of broadening their own base and the SHA program committee was very pleased
• Mostly we got individual papers (which I think is good). We had one fully constituted panel submitted, the rest were individual papers. We will have six panels, and we put some extra papers in graduate student panels.
• We wanted more Caribbean and our panels include one fully Caribbean panel
• The SHA is pleased that we are doing different things and that it fits with their goals
• Michael Polushin is program chair for Atlanta
• 2004 Panels

Michael Polushin, Program Chair, 2005:

• We are guaranteed six panels for Atlanta

Richmond Brown, President-Elect

• The Executive Committee talked about structure of book prize. Outgoing chair will rotate off, there will be two other members, and no one will have more than a two year term. This prize is a marketing opportunity
• The Woodward Prize Committee will be made up of Tim Henderson, Lance Graham, and Pamela Murray
• Program Committee will be Program Chair and two people named by chair.
• By-laws Committee: Marshall Eakin, Richmond Brown, and the new President-elect
• The Nominating Committee nominated Ginger Gould of Tulane for President-Elect

Voice Vote: Virginia Gould was elected unanimously by voice vote as President-Elect.

Tom O'Brien, (University of Houston), Speaker

• O'Brien discussed his current work on Inter-American relations in the last 200 years and the status of the discipline of study of early Inter-American relations.