This volume contains the proceedings of the conference on 'Exactly Soluble Models in Statistical Mechanics: Historical Perspectives and Current Status', held at Northeastern University in March 1996 — the first ever conference to deal exclusively with this topic. Besides invited presentations by leading researchers in the field, the conference held a session of contributed papers by participants from throughout the world. The proceedings, which include both the invited and the contributed papers, reflect the broad range of interest in exactly soluble models as well as the diverse fields in physics and mathematics that they connect. Apart from providing concise and timely reviews, the papers in this volume give a snapshot of the current state of affairs. The topics covered range from a historical survey of the field (by E H Lieb) to the latest formulation of a star-star transformation of spin models (by R J Baxter).