An Interview
with New JAH Editor

Rebecca Sharpless

Editor's Note: Rebecca Sharpless, Baylor University, met Joanne Meyerowitz, the new editor of the Journal of American History, at the OAH annual meeting in St. Louis last April. Meyerowitz, who has just finished a National Humanities Center Fellowship, will begin her tenure in Bloomington this month.

Rebecca Sharpless: How did you first get involved with OAH?

Joanne Meyerowitz: Well, I've been a member of the OAH since I was a graduate student in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I got more involved a few years ago when I served on the Program Committee for the OAH conference, the one held in Chicago in 1996 [for the San Francisco meeting in 1997]. That was an important experience for me. It gave me a different angle of vision into the profession, and it gave me new insight into a wide array of subfields. I could see more clearly which subfields had come to the fore, and I was somewhat surprised by how many members of the profession seemed to feel that their subfields had been left behind or displaced.

RS: What was your take on that? What were some of those fields that were surging and some that were falling back?

JM: What I learned then was that historians in a number of subspecialties feel somewhat aggrieved, feel that they've been displaced from the center of the profession. People who are doing early American history, the history of foreign relations, economic history, labor history, intellectual history, and I could go on, but there are historians in a range of subfields who feel that the emphasis in the past twenty years on social and cultural history had moved them to the margins. I was not fully aware of the sense of grievance or the language of grievance until I served on that committee.

RS: Is it possible that the profession of history for everybody is about to rise? Does one have to fall as one rises?

JM: Well, I think it's impossible for every field to come to the fore at once. There are complicated social, intellectual, and political reasons why some subfields come forward at a particular historical moment and recede at another. And yet I think that virtually everyone would agree that we have and will continue to have a wide variety of subspecialties and that we want some recognition of and representation for all of them.

RS: How did you first learn about the opportunity of editing the JAH?

JM: I saw the position advertised in AHA Perspectives, and it piqued my interest. I had edited an anthology and co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Women's History, and in both cases I had enjoyed the work. I enjoyed seeing what gems other historians had discovered in the archives and what new interpretations were emerging in the field, and I also enjoyed the process of helping colleagues sharpen their arguments and bring out the larger historical significance of their work. In the years before I saw the ad for the JAH editor position, I had seriously considered editing two journals, but the opportunity and resources for doing it just weren't there. I also had an interest in Indiana University, which is where the JAH and OAH are located. I had spent an academic year--1996-1997--in residence at the Kinsey Institute on the IU campus. The Kinsey Institute's library and archives hold the most important collections for my current research, and I was drawn by the possibility of living right next door. I'm also a fan of the history department at Indiana University. So, with regard to colleagues, research, and editing, the job looked like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

RS: And you were interviewed by committees?

JM: Yes, I was interviewed by the search committee at the American Historical Association conference in Washington, DC. Then they narrowed the list down to three candidates and brought us onto the campus of Indiana University and into the offices of the OAH and JAH. Much of the interview resembled any other academic job interview. I gave a talk on my research, and I met with members of the history department. And then I spent several hours talking to the staff at the OAH and JAH, and learning how they operate from the inside.

RS: What is the arrangement between the OAH and the Indiana history department?

JM: Indiana University provides space for the Organization of American Historians and the Journal of American History. It also provides other services and funding, including my salary. In return, the OAH hires graduate students to work in its office and as editorial assistants at the Journal and generally enhances the national reputation of the university. With the history department, there's a mutual enrichment. The OAH and JAH benefit from the faculty and graduate students of a major university, and the history department benefits from having the professional organization and the Journal right on campus.

RS: What will you be teaching in the history department?

JM: This coming fall I'll teach an undergraduate course on U.S. women's history, and in the spring I'll teach a graduate course on the history of sexuality. I've taught the U.S. women's history course for years now, and I'm looking forward to reshaping it on a new campus with a somewhat different set of students. I've taught the history of sexuality graduate course only once before, and I'm hoping to develop it in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute as well as the history department. I want to introduce the history graduate students to the rich and underused archival resources on their campus.

RS: Okay, so two courses a year?

JM: Right. One course each semester.

RS: When you look at the JAH over the last five to ten years, what do you like about it?

JM: I think it's an excellent journal with an excellent staff. I have visions for how I might change the Journal, but I'd also like to say first that I think it's a great journal right now, and I'm planning to keep it that way.

RS: What are some of the foundations that you're hoping to keep?

JM: Well, the Journal, I think, publishes the best of the best in scholarly monographic articles, and I plan to maintain that. It also highlights current historiographic concerns. I hope to continue the roundtables and forums that present the latest debates and trends in the field. We'll certainly be maintaining and continuing the new electronics initiatives. We've just started to publish current issues of the JAH online through a partnership called the History Cooperative. We're also beginning to move more of the production of the Journal into electronic forms, and we'll be experimenting more with online supplements for Journal articles. We're working right now on a cumulative online version of the Recent Scholarship section of the Journal. And I'm also hoping to continue the internationalization that David Thelen started at the beginning of the 1990s. We have a board of international contributing editors who are based outside of the United States, and I want to keep that initiative going, bringing the perspectives of historians who study the United States but who aren't based in the United States into the pages of the Journal.

RS: Okay. Are there other new directions that you want to take it in?

JM: I've been talking to friends and colleagues about the Journal for the past year, and one of the things that's struck me is that people no longer talk as much about fragmentation and synthesis, which were buzzwords common ten or fifteen years ago. Back then, there was some fear that the plethora of subfields was undermining the overarching narrative of U.S. history or from the other side a fear that the dominant narrative was ignoring the rich historical scholarship in the new specializations. Today I'm sensing less concern about either fragmentation or synthesis. Historians seem to agree that subfields are the vitality of the profession and also agree that synthesis is an ongoing process, that as much as we may dislike a particular overarching narrative of American history, every time we teach a survey course or write a textbook or plan a museum exhibition we're going to have synthesis. So what I would like to do with the Journal is move away from the old debates on fragmentation and synthesis and attempt to create some kind of intellectual community that encompasses both the diversity in the field and the desire for something that holds it all together. I'm in favor of inclusivity. I know that sounds banal, but it's probably a point that should be made explicitly. I would hope that historians from various subfields perceive the Journal as representative of their own areas of interest. My goal, though, is not to reorient the Journal away from the new specializations and return it to the traditional ones; I'm hoping instead to open a larger umbrella that covers more subfields, within the limits of the pages of the Journal. I'm also hoping to encourage more dialogue among the subfields, and I do have some specific plans for doing that. I'm commissioning some historiographic essays in which historians explain the most intriguing trends in their subfields to historians who aren't specialists in those areas. In the past, the Journal has done some surveys among historians, which have shown that readers want more historiographic essays, that readers use such essays to teach and keep up on the field. I'm also planning to have roundtables or special issues in which historians from different subfields address a common topic or concept and engage in dialogue with each other. And I'm also hoping to push the authors of monographic articles to make their essays significant and interesting for historians outside their areas of specialization. The Journal already does this, it has done this for years, and now we'll do it more.

RS: Say more about the electronic formats. What's going on with that?

JM: The new History Cooperative is a partnership of the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, University of Illinois Press, and National Academy Press. The History Cooperative website is operating now, with current issues of the Journal of American History and the American Historical Review online as fully searchable text. Past issues of the Journal are still available online through JSTOR, but we're putting current issues online now with a more powerful search engine for research. We're just launching it now, and we're asking for feedback from people who use it to find out how we can make it better. Beyond that, the JAH has also in the past few years started to use the web to highlight some of the contents of the print Journal. For example, the special issue on the Declaration of Independence had an online supplement with the Declaration itself translated from other languages back into English. This turned out to be a useful teaching tool for all sorts of people who don't actually read the Journal of American History. So we want to do more of that. Sometimes we publish articles that would work well in the U.S. history survey or in high school history classes. We might use our website to offer guidance on how an article could work as a lesson plan and include documents or visual images to supplement what's in the print Journal. What we've found so far is that it's not just the readers of the Journal who go to the website. People who are web surfing end up at our site. We're hoping that some of them may go farther and move from the website to reading the Journal.

RS: How are the resources given to that? You have a paper journal to get out. How is all the work getting done on all the electronic things, then? Making hyperlinks is time consuming.

JM: We have a specialist, Kristin Wagner, who devotes her time to the electronic concerns of the Journal, and her work has been indispensable. She is the person with the technical expertise to make this happen. We're delighted to have her on board. She's been helping us enter the electronic age. She redesigned our website, and she worked with our printer and our advisors from the History Cooperative project to convert the disks used in putting the Journal out in print to disks used for putting the Journal online. She's currently working on the Recent Scholarship database.

RS: How do you envision that the editor will interact with the editorial board? How does the actual work get done on the Journal, from the time that an article comes in till the time that it's published?

JM: There's a process of self-selection that goes on even before we see the manuscripts. Some historians read the Journal and think, "The Journal publishes the kind of work I do," and other historians read the Journal and think the Journal doesn't publish the kind of work they do. As a result, some people send manuscripts to the Journal, and some people send manuscripts elsewhere. One of my goals is to change the process of self-selection so that more historians see the Journal as a place where they should submit their work. That aside, historians submit their manuscripts to the JAH, and we read them in the Journal office. The associate editor reads the manuscript first and writes a report on it. The editor reads the report and the manuscript and then chooses outside reviewers to serve as referees. We usually include a member of the editorial board among the outside referees.

RS: How many?

JM: In the past, it has been quite a few. Manuscripts have been sent out to five or six readers, which many authors find excessive. We may well reduce those numbers with the hope that we can cut the time taken to reach a decision. Once the reviewers' reports come in, the editor, associate editor, assistant editor, and other staff sit down together to go over reports on the more promising pieces and decide jointly what would improve each manuscript. Then the editor writes a letter to the author with a decision and with specific suggestions for improving the piece. I have to say here that I haven't actually started working as editor yet. The acting editor David Nord and the current associate editor Wendy Gamber are now doing the job quite well. So what I'm talking about is not what I've done but what has gone on in the past.

RS: As you were talking, I was just thinking about that process of self-selection. JAH has kind of an interesting role, because so many times each subfield has its own journal. How do you make a decision to send something to the JAH rather than to the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of Women's History?

JM: We have many first-rate journals that cover specific subspecialties within U.S. history. The JAH is especially interested in the kinds of articles that speak across subfields, that address larger questions in U.S. history, or that alert historians to the cutting edge in subfields other than their own. Some articles are more suited for a specialized journal. But sometimes an author has a manuscript that would fit perfectly into the JAH, and she or he decides not to send it to us. Like all editors, I want authors to send us their manuscripts. We'll treat them all fairly, and we'll make our decisions as quickly as possible.

RS: A lot of us look at the articles, but what we really go for are the book reviews. How do you see the book reviews in the role of the Journal?

JM: Well, the book reviews are central to the JAH. The Journal is the journal of record for American history, and we make it our goal to review the original scholarly books in the field. We now publish more than six hundred book reviews each year. That's a central part of the Journal, and that's a part of the Journal I'll certainly maintain.

RS: When a book comes out now, a review shows up on H-Net within a period of months, whereas it takes years literally for the book reviews to come out in print. How do you see the interaction between the H-Net reviews and the JAH reviews?

JM: Well, most books are reviewed more than once, and that's a good thing. Unfortunately, because of the requirements of print technology, we can't present reviews to our readers as quickly as H-Net can. It's possible that at some point in the future we may start posting some of the reviews on our website as soon as they're edited, but we're not quite at that point yet. So I think that we could say that H-Net offers a quick review that comes out earlier, and we offer a review that comes out a little bit later but that undergoes a more rigorous process of editing and has a certain kind of permanency that comes with appearing in print. The print volumes will be in libraries for decades to come, or so I hope.

RS: You are at the National Humanities Center this year, right?

JM: Yes, I'm on leave this year at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. I'm completing a draft of my book on the history of transsexuality in the United States. It's tentatively titled, "How Sex Changed." I'm starting in the early twentieth century with the early sex change experiments on animals in Europe, and then moving to the United States and tracing out the social, medical, and cultural history of transsexuality up to the present. I see this history as a way to explore changing conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality.

RS: What have I not asked you about that you want to talk about with the OAH readers?

JM: I might be wrong here, but I think there is still some agreement among historians about what constitutes good history. We write on different topics and we have political differences, but I believe we generally share similar standards of evidence and notions of valid argument. In the classrooms, textbooks, or museums, most of us address a broad range of U.S. history, not just our own specializations. I'm hoping that the Journal serves as a place where historians find the best of the best in all of the subfields of U.S. history and learn about specializations other than their own. I'd also like to say that all of my thoughts about where the Journal might go are still in the process of formation. I'm just starting the job, and nothing is yet set in stone. I welcome any suggestions from members of the OAH.

Joanne Meyerowitz can be reached at: jmeyerow@indiana.edu.