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Editor's Annual Report, 2002–2003
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The Journal of American History is a highly collaborative endeavor, involving authors, referees, reviewers, editors, editorial assistants, production specialists, and more. In the last volume, our collective efforts produced the following tangible results: 14 articles, a published version of an OAH presidential address, a number of shorter round table essays on "Self and Subject" and "History and September 11," 2 historiographic essays, 1 review essay, 4 essays on technology and teaching, 3 essays on oral history, and reviews of 15 exhibitions, 21 films, 24 Web sites, and 622 books. Over the past year, we also jointly transformed our September 2002 special issue, "History and September 11," into a book. Tailored for classroom use with primary source documents, an expanded introduction, and a new afterword essay, History and September 11th is coming out in July from Temple University Press. |
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In the JAH office, we devote most of our time and energy to the everyday routines of vetting, editing, and publishing reviews and articles, but we also work on special projects that, we hope, will provoke additional thought and promote more dialogue among historians. With this issue, we launch one such initiative, "Interchange," an annual section of the Journal that will feature conversations on the practice of history. As public intellectuals advocate, historians should seek and create opportunities to speak to a broader public. But we should also foster forums where we speak primarily to one another, where we discuss and debate the rules of our game, the meanings of our endeavors, and the implications of our arguments. By taking advantage of electronic possibilities, our "Interchange" conversations will aim for scholarly exchanges among historians that involve more deliberation than on-the-spot, face-to-face discussions permit. For our initial experiment, conducted last October, we invited nine senior historians to participate in a broad-ranging, month-long, online conversation on recent changes in historical practice. The edited version appears in these pages. Our second "Interchange," currently under construction, will include public as well as academic historians and focus on genres of history. In the coming year, we will also continue our series of historiographic essays, with new articles already commissioned on the history of religion, the history of civil rights before 1954, and the history of war. In addition, we have round tables in the offing on history and ethics and on the legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision. |
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We also have plans to upgrade "Recent Scholarship Online" (RSO), our searchable database of recently published history books, articles, dissertations, document sets, and CD-ROMs. To create the recent scholarship listings, our editorial assistants and contributing editors comb through more than a thousand journals as well as anthologies and Dissertation Abstracts International. In the print version of "Recent Scholarship," which appears at the back of every issue of the Journal, each citation appears under only one topical category, such as "science and medicine" or "theory and methodology." The online cumulative version provides a more sophisticated research tool. It now has more than nineteen thousand citations, and one search trolls through all of them. In addition to the usual "Recent Scholarship" listings, RSO includes books we review in the JAH and articles within anthologies. And in RSO each book, dissertation, document set, CD-ROM, or article is placed in up to three chronological and four topical categories. The database is searchable by multiple topics and chronological categories and by author, keywords in the title, years of publication, and journal title. We invite those of our readers who still use the increasingly archaic print "Recent Scholarship" to try out RSO, which is available to OAH members at <http://www.oah.org/rs/>. This tremendously useful database covers more than five hundred journals not indexed by America: History and Life. In the coming year, we plan to make it even better with new features that will speed up and enhance searches, allow for better browsing, provide live links to JAH articles and reviews at the History Cooperative, and permit the saving, e-mailing, and maintaining of multiple bibliographies, which users can create for themselves. |
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