If you are reading this, you are a prospective or current author of an article in an upcoming issue of the OAH Magazine of History. In some ways, the MOH is a strange bird. It’s not a peer-reviewed scholarly journal like the Journal of American History. It’s not a popular magazine like TIME. It’s somewhere in between. Because of this hybrid quality, writing effectively for the MOH can be tricky. In meeting that challenge, we suggest that you keep the following considerations and suggestions in mind.

Mission
The MOH aims to improve the teaching of U.S. history by providing a bridge between the worlds of secondary classroom teachers, community college and university faculty, published scholars, public historians, and history enthusiasts of all types. The Magazine accomplishes this by providing up-to-date scholarship on a particular theme or topic in American history through accessible background essays, practical teaching strategies, and primary document features.

Audience
Who reads the OAH Magazine of History? Here’s what we know about our roughly 3,000 individual “subscribers”:

• Just over half are members of the OAH who receive the MOH as their primary publication. These are mainly high school history teachers, many of whom joined the OAH through a Teaching American History (TAH) grant, and also include community college history teachers. All of them are “History Educator” members of the OAH.
• About a third consists of regular OAH members who receive the Journal of American History and pay extra to subscribe to the MOH. They are generally college history faculty.
• There are also several hundred non-OAH member readers, who include staff at historic sites and museums. And there are several hundred student subscribers.
• The MOH is also available in hard copy form through some 1,700 “institutional subscribers” (university and college libraries as well as some high schools and historical societies).
• It is available in digital form through J-STOR (back issues up to five years back from the current date) and EBSCO (last five years). Each new issue is also available to any OAH member as a downloadable pdf file. Finally, selected articles for each new issue are posted on the MOH website and are freely available and searchable on the web.

Style
Keep it simple. Avoid jargon or obscure terminology. Assume that your readers have a general knowledge of U.S. history but may know nothing about your topic or your specialty. Write for a broadly educated general reader. But don’t assume that readers are already interestedengage them. Consider starting with a hook to draw in the reader. And once you’ve gotten their attention, don’t forget the old cliché that “variety is the spice of life.” It is. (Vary your sentence length.)

Concreteness
Keep your discussion as concrete as possible. It is understood that you will have to summarize material to condense it into an appropriate length for the Magazine. But always give specific examples. Tell us a story. Introduce us to some individual people. Use a compelling quotation. All of this keeps the reader’s attention and helps drive home your argument. (Concrete examples also help us find images to illustrate your article. See also Illustrations below.)

Pedagogy
Even if you are writing a feature articleand not a teaching strategykeep in mind that the ultimate aim here is to improve what happens in the classroom. Where appropriate, you can address teachers directly. Feel free to draw upon your own experience in the classroom.

Reasonable documentation
Provide documentation when necessary. We don’t want to overwhelm readers with large numbers of footnotes, or with long individual discursive notes. But we do want authors to document any specific information that is not common knowledge. Ideally, your article will prompt readers to learn more, and they need to know where to go next. Fifteen to twenty notes for a feature article is par for the course.

Illustrations
A magazine reader cannot live by text alone. Every article in the MOH is illustrated by some combination of photographs, maps, drawings, paintings, political cartoonswhatever will help convey the messages in your article, draw in readers and bring your story to life. On average, we use two to three illustrations per article. Literally, a picture is worth about a thousand words! We squeeze in more illustrations if space and budget allow. The relatively high ratio of images to text sets a magazine apart from a journal. Take a look at any popular magazine, and you’ll realize that it’s chock full of images.

Since our image budget is small, we get most of our images for free or at nominal cost. These typically come from the Library of Congress or other public archives. They are usually black and white photos. But our general approach is the more color the better. We will use as many as our budget allows. It is our job to track down article illustrations and to prepare them for use in the magazine. But you can help by suggesting images to use or by providing them to us. If you have original photos or other illustrations, and can send them to us by snail mail, we’ll be happy to take it from there, and to send them back to you in good shape. (IF you do choose to send a digital image to us, see Image Resolution and Copyright Considerations below.)

Image Resolution
We need images with a high resolution. Resolution tells you how finely grained an image is. It is usually expressed as dpi (dots per inch) or ppi (pixels per inch). Images that appear online are almost always set at 72 ppi. They look fine on the computer screen. But if you download one of those images, place it into a magazine layout, and then print it on paper, it will appear “pixilated.” For print publications, images need to be higher resolution. Our cover images need to be 600 dpi. And most relevant for your purposes, any image we use in the interior of the magazine needs to be roughly 300 dpi. If you have an illustration that you are scanning, you should be able to set the scanning resolution in the software you’re using. Set it to 300 dpi.

One important caveat: when we take a digital image that you have scanned or sent to us, and we adjust its size, its resolution changes also. Basically, the bigger we make the image, the lower the resolution gets. Think of a balloon with text on it. As you blow up the balloon, the text stretches. The same thing happens with pixels in a digital image. As the pixels get larger, the image looks more pixilated. Suppose you have an original photo of an historical figure who appears in your article but it’s tinysay, 2 x 3 inchesand you scan it at 300 dpi. Since we won’t run a tiny image in the magazine, we’ll have to blow it up. If we make it twice as large, the resolution is cut in halfto 150 dpiwhich won’t look good. So, if you have a tiny original, you’ll want to scan it at more than 300 dpi600 dpi would probably be safe. Then, when we double the size of its dimensions, it will be back at 300 dpi, which will look fine.

Copyright Considerations
In order to print an illustration or reproduce a primary document in the MOH, it is our job to make sure that we have legal permission to do so. But since you may be providing us with an item you’d like us to print with your article, here is some information that may be helpful:

Due to the tangled history of copyright law, anything originally produced or published before 1923 is generally assumed to be in the public domain. Anything produced after that date may have an existing copyright requiring permission to republish. If the item is held by an archive, we can usually obtain permission to republish for a reasonable fee.

If you have previously published an article or book with an image that you would like to use again for an article in the MOH, the permission your previous publisher received will almost certainly not cover re-publication in the MOH. Such permission is normally given on a one-time basis. In that event, we will need to find out who holds the copyright and request permission. As long as permission is given and any required fee is not prohibitive, we can republish the item in the MOH.

After we publish your article in the MOH, you will sign a letter transferring copyright to the OAH. The OAH will then have exclusive right to publish or allow others to publish the article, in full or in part, in print or electronic media. In addition, this agreement will grant you the following:

• permission, free of charge, to reprint your article in any book you may write or edit (as long as the original MOH publication credit and OAH copyright are acknowledged)
• sharing of reprint fees 50%-50% with the OAH.

You will also receive complimentary copies of the issue in which your article appears. (If you have questions about any of the points above, please contact the Editor, Carl R. Weinberg, at crweinbe@oah.org or at 812/855-9882.)