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Editor's Annual Report, 2003–2004
| As many of you know, the Journal of American History began publication ninety years ago as the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, a regional journal devoted primarily to the history of the U.S. West. In the first issue, published in June 1914, the editors noted the rapid "development of interest in American history" and the "new interpretations." "Our readers," they wrote, "will ... obtain a view of the research being conducted ... and notable developments in methods will be particularly emphasized."1 Today the JAH circulates to around 7,500 individual members of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), most of whom are professional historians, and to around 2,200 institutions. It brings together all subfields of U.S. history. And its goals are not all that different from those of the founding editors. Like most history journals, ours aims to engage historians who seek to teach and learn from one another. It tries to showcase the latest in research, method, theory, and argument and to inform readers about trends and debates within the historical profession. It hopes to keep readers apprised of the best of current scholarship and to promote dialogue among historians with different approaches to the past. |
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In the workaday world, our first orders of business are publishing scholarly articles and reviewing books. In 2003 we vetted 206 article manuscripts. Of the regular article submissions, the most common topics were (in descending order) politics, social and cultural history, African American history, race, and international relations. For the manuscripts we sent out for external review, it took on average a hundred days from the date the manuscript arrived in our office to the date we sent a letter of decision. We accepted around 10 percent of the articles submitted. In selecting articles, we followed, as usual, the recommendations of our peer reviewers. Beyond that, we tried to choose original, sound, significant articles that would appeal to readers in a variety of subfields, articles that open out, as we say in our office, from the specific details of the research to broader conceptual and historiographic issues. Through our book reviews, we aim to serve as the journal of record for American history. In 2003 we received more than 1,700 books; from those we chose 633 to send out for review. We looked primarily for serious history, and as usual we excluded novels, children's books, second editions, primary sources, and textbooks. |
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In volume 90, which covered the issues from June 2003 to March 2004, we published 15 articles, a presidential address, an edited conversation among nine historians, 3 short essays on teaching, and reviews of 623 books, 23 Web sites, 23 movies, and 17 exhibitions. To highlight emerging trends and debates, we also published 3 historiographic essays—on the concept of diaspora, the history of the book, and the history of religion—and we invited five scholars to contribute to a round table on "History's Ethical Crisis," a reference to the spate of recent publicity about historians who have plagiarized or misrepresented evidence. In addition, we posted two new installments of our "Teaching the JAH" Web project. |
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The task of covering all of U.S. history is a daunting one, especially given the chronological span, the proliferation of subfields, and the small number of articles we can accommodate each year. One of our ongoing challenges is chronological coverage. Many more historians study the recent past than study earlier eras, which means that most of the manuscripts we receive address relatively recent history. We do not want to impose a false chronological balance on a discipline that is skewed, for various reasons, toward the twentieth century, and we want to select the best articles, regardless of chronological or topical subfield. But we also do not want to neglect the history of early America. |
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