>Please cast your vote on Motion 00-1 to appoint a historian of the Project, >by replying with your equivalent of yes, no, abstain. The way the motion is currently phrased, I will have to vote No. ************** I think there is a great deal of merit, though, in Maggie Stewart's conception of the historian as a "timeline maintainer". It would be extremely valuable if there was someone responsible for maintaining a table of the dates that each state first came online, who held offices over what periods, etc. The longer we go without recording such info systematically, the harder it is to recover it. Something that we are all familiar with as genealogists. But many of the comments made by other board members (the historian should be tactful, unbiased, etc.) seem to envision a more narrative history, which I think is a bad idea for the reasons that Virginia expressed. Since it is unclear which of the two kinds of historian a yes vote would be voting for, I vote no.