Read the September, 2006 JAH online

News from the Journal of American History

From the Editor of the Journal of American History
Edward T. Linenthal

The December 2006 issue of the Journal of American History will include Vicki Ruiz’s presidential address, “Nuestra América: Latino History as United States History.” The issue will feature three articles: Claudio Saunt’s “Telling Stories: The Political Uses of Myth and History in the Cherokee and Creek Nations”; Linda Gordon’s “Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist”; and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s “Conventional Iconoclasm: The Cultural Work of the Nietzsche Image in Twentieth-Century America.” This issue will also feature a round table on the career of Lawrence Levine. Roy Rosenzweig opens the round table with a brief introduction, followed by a substantial introduction by Leon F. Litwack. Following the introduction are revised texts of keynote presentations given at the conference “The State of Cultural History: A Conference in Honor of Lawrence Levine,” which was held in the fall of 2005. We are delighted to publish the keynotes of Nell Irvin Painter and Jean-Christophe Agnew. The round table concludes with an edited interview with Levine conducted by the Regional Oral History Office at the University of California, Berkeley.

Thanks to Associate Editor John Nieto-Phillips, the JAH has had the opportunity to be involved in a very different and important project. On April 30, 2006, a fire in the basement of Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, destroyed approximately 30,000 volumes of journals in the areas of history, ethnic studies, Latin American studies, and anthropology. On learning this news, the staff at the Journal of American History rounded up 25 years (or 100 back issues) of the journal and donated them to the University of New Mexico.

John Baesler, our international editorial assistant, attended a meeting of international editors of American studies journals at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association in October in Oakland, California.

The staff of the JAH is delighted to learn that Thomas Andrews has been awarded the 2006 Ray Allen Billington Award from the Western History Association for his article “Made by Toile”? Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858-1917,” Journal of American History (December 2005).

Melissa C. Beaver, our information technology manager, has been working with the History Cooperative to update the site as well as develop new features that will benefit users and editors of the journals forming the cooperative and foster an online community of historians. Such changes will continue the pioneering spirit of the cooperative, making it an innovator in disseminating scholarship online. We are very excited about the changes and the new initiatives previewed at the annual summer meeting in Bloomington. Melissa is also continuing to work on significant improvements in our database submission and evaluation process. When building a system that processes all the materials we receive, we wanted to create an application that could grow and expand as our needs changed and increased. Melissa has built such a flexible system. This year, as the number of submissions grew, we asked for an efficient system to process the increased volume. Once again, Melissa has come through for us. She has expanded our database capability to allow us to manage the flow of each manuscript from submission through to decision and, if it is accepted, publication. This was not an easy task, but she completed it in a timely fashion. In the past, the Journal searched for comparable software, but we were unable to find any that provides the level of detail we require to make the peer review process as efficient and fair as we demand. This new benefit added to our database allows us to streamline the process without any damage to the integrity of the blind peer review process that is at the heart of our evaluation. With some exceptions, we are able to enter an article submission in our database, read it in-house (it is read by both a primary and a secondary reader), and if it is not rejected in-house, submit it to readers and make a decision based on readers’ reports within three months.