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Editor's Note
| Looking back should be the historical editor's stock in trade. To upon one's own work, however—or the work of one's own journal—is to risk believing with Henry Ford that "history is more or less bunk." How can we know the impact of our own words on anyone other than ourselves? Why presume anyone else's interest in a topic that is to us a matter of identity? |
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So it is that I approach the close of the IMH's 100th year with some circumspection. This journal is more fittingly a chronicle of history than a historical subject in its own right. Yet something in a round number invites reflection about the past. Ford himself was no mean collector of historical artifacts, and though he readily dismissed "bunk" when its implications didn't suit his needs, he rarely shied away from a chance to cast his own efforts in historical light. Could not the IMH also be indulged a moment of reflection? |
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Two "big ideas" suggest themselves for the occasion, and I am glad to report that both have already been pursued. Readers seeking a collection of classic articles can turn to Lorna Lutes Sylvester's "No Cheap Padding": Seventy-Five Years of the Indiana Magazine of History, published by the Indiana Historical Society in 1980, which also includes a fine historical overview of the journal to that date. Many of the best works appearing in our pages since then can be found on the journal's website, http://www.indiana.edu/~imaghist/. Secondly, readers looking for an overview of larger questions at play among Indiana historians over the last century are fortunate to have The State of Indiana History 2000: Papers Presented at the Indiana Historical Society's Grand Opening, edited by the late Robert M. Taylor, Jr., with the aid of the editorial staff of the Indiana Historical Society. The eighteen contributors to that volume summarize not only the key questions that make Indiana's history worth investigating, but also the lines along which that investigation has proceeded in the last century or more of historical work. Their book still commends itself, five years after publication, as the best starting place for the reader seeking to understand the practice of Indiana history. |
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Thanks to these earlier efforts, then, this issue can afford to entertain a more modest goal: to reflect on the journal's ongoing evolution as it appears from our vantage point in 2005. We begin with remarks on the life and work of the IMH's longest-serving editor, Donald F. Carmony, who died earlier this year. Carmony's associate Lorna Lutes Sylvester talks about the journal and the practice of Indiana history as they evolved during her own distinguished term, which lasted from 1964 to 1999. James Madison, himself a longtime IMH editor, contrasts the state's culture in 1905 and today through a telling examination of Hoosier heroes, then and now. The issue also features historian David Bodenhamer and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Randall Shepard's broad interpretive overview of the state's legal history, which is drawn from their forthcoming edited volume on Indiana law, to be published next year by Ohio University Press. |
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As this note concludes and as this 100th year ends, I want to turn from past to future. You will find an envelope in this issue, inviting you to contribute to Indiana University's IMH Second-Century Fund. To those of you who gave to the fund earlier this year, I thank you. Your contributions will go toward enhancing those aspects of the IMH budget that come specifically from IU: student training, website development, and educational efforts such as the "IMH for Teachers" lessons that will begin appearing online early next year. If you have not yet had a chance to add your name to the list of those who are helping the IMH expand to meet its challenges in these and other areas, I invite you to do so with a tax-deductible, year-end contribution. Future Hoosier historians will be grateful for your support. |
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Finally, the journal owes its own debt of gratitude to its steadiest patron, now and throughout the last century of publication: the Indiana Historical Society. IHS provides the support that makes the IMH a benefit of membership, and in so doing provides this journal with a wonderful audience of active, skeptical, informed Hoosier readers. We look forward to keeping those readers interested and involved for many years to come. |
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