The Organization of American Historians (OAH), formerly known as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, is the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history. OAH's members in the U.S. and abroad include college and university professors; historians, students; precollegiate teachers; archivists, museum curators, and other public historians; and a variety of scholars employed in government and the private sector. The OAH publishes the Journal of American History. Among its various programs, OAH conducts an annual conference each spring, and has a robust speaker bureau—the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program. The organization's mission is to promote excellence in the scholarship, teaching, and presentation of American history, and encourage wide discussion of historical questions and equitable treatment of all practitioners of history. Membership is open to all who wish to support its mission. In 2010 its individual membership is approximately 8,000 and its institutional membership approximately 1,250. For its 2009 fiscal year ending June 30, 2009, the organization's operating budget was approximately $2.9 million. In its 2018 annual report, membership in the organization "stabilized" with approximately 7,000 members. In fiscal year 2019 (ending June 30, 2019), the organization's budget was $3.66 million. History The Mississippi Valley Historical Association was formed at a meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, of seven historical societies of the Mississippi Valley on October 17 and 18, 1907. The organization, devoted to studying the Mississippi Valley region, began a tradition of holding an annual meeting each year, and began quarterly publication in 1914 of the Mississippi Valley Historical Review. As the scholarly emphasis of the organization and its journal developed and spread over time, its initial emphasis on the Mississippi Valley came under sharp challenge from members who wanted a better title and a wider scope. Ray Billington, OAH president in 1962-1963, detailed four issues that arose and caused bitter quarreling during the discussion about the proposed name change in a 1978 Journal of American History essay: the desire to use the association's prestige to fight for liberal reforms, to change the association's name to represent a national scope, to democratize its oligarchical structure, and to take a firm stand against racial discrimination in terms of hotels and meeting cities. The reformers were successful and the Mississippi Valley Historical Review was renamed the Journal of American History and the organization, correspondingly, was renamed the Organization of American Historians the following year. Indiana University was selected as home