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Editor's Note
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IN THIS ISSUE | |
American voters recently concluded a long and particularly tumultuous presidential campaign with their election of Barack Obama. The nation has seen twenty-six presidential elections since the IMH first appeared in 1905. While Hoosiers have figured prominently as vice-presidential nominees and as presidential hopefuls in several of those campaigns, the level of activity that the state saw from the spring of this year through Election Day has seldom been equaled. To capture Indiana's particular contributions to the national political scene in 2008, the IMH has commissioned two scholars—Marjorie Randon Hershey and David Williams—to comment on the Indiana Democratic primary and the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the state's "Voter ID" law, respectively. Their essays, written before the November 2008 election, appear in this issue.
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Elsewhere in the issue, you will find two quite different slices of life in twentieth-century Indiana: one, an excerpt of the memoir of Dr. Elsie Meyers, a St. Louis-based retired anaesthesiologist who recalls the trials of becoming a physician at midcentury—a time when women, and especially rural women, were a rare commodity indeed in the state's medical community. Alexandra Minna Stern, whom IMH readers will recognize as the author of a March 2007 essay about Indiana's first eugenics laws, introduces Meyers's recollections from the perspective of a historian of medicine. After the memoir, longtime IMH contributor Randy Mills reaches back to the turn of the century for an episode that never made it remotely near the annals of scholarly physiology: the discovery and subsequent display of a "petrified man" dredged up on the Evansville waterfront. As Mills shows, the hoax resonated with other such pseudoscientific "discoveries" across the country at a time of great social transformation.
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THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS | |
In order that we may keep up with rising production costs, we will raise the price of subscribing directly to the IMH, effective January 2009, to $24 per year ($30 for international subscribers). Members of the Indiana Historical Society (IHS) will continue to enjoy a substantial discount from this rate if they elect to order the journal directly from IHS as an addition to their membership (see www.indianahistory.org for details), although we still welcome direct subscribers who wish to order the journal, at the full rate, from our offices at Indiana University. The IMH remains among the most affordable (and we hope among the best) of all historical journals.
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| Finally, as the year draws to a close, I invite our readers to consider offering a tax-deductible contribution to the IMH's Second-Century Fund. If you have given in the past, you know that this fund helps us to cover the costs of special initiatives that go beyond our printing and personnel costs. In 2008, for example, we saw the successful launch of our full-text-searchable IMH Online (http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/imh/), a good example of our continued efforts to offer ever-more useful and compelling historical writing to ever-wider audiences. To contribute, please send your tax-deductible contribution, payable to "IMH Second-Century Fund," to the IU Foundation, Post Office Box 500, Bloomington, Indiana, 47402. |
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