Guidelines for Authors
Please click on the below links to read specific guidelines for the Journal's manuscript categories:
Articles
Book Reviews
Public History Reviews
Movie Reviews
Digital History Reviews
Textbooks and Teaching
Author Toll Free Link and Discounts
Articles
Where to Send Your Manuscript
An electronic version should be submitted in an e-mail attachment sent to jahms@oah.org. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the requirement of print copies has been temporarily suspended.
All articles submitted to the Journal of American History must include an abstract. This abstract must be on a separate page from the body of the article and may not be longer than 500 words. Author names should not appear on the abstract or article.
Formatting
All text, including quotations and footnotes, should be prepared in double-spaced typescript according to The Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press). See the Journal’s style sheet for further details.
The electronic version should be in Microsoft Word.
Because submissions are evaluated anonymously, the author’s name should appear only on the title page. Please provide your full address, including e-mail, in all correspondence.
Length
Manuscripts, including footnotes, must not exceed 14,000 words. The JAH rarely publishes regular research articles that are less than 10,000 words.
Illustrations
Once a manuscript is accepted for publication, the JAH strongly encourages the author to enhance the article with illustrations. The author will be responsible for providing the illustrations in a form that is suitable for publication, for obtaining permissions, and for paying any permission, use, or processing fees involved with the illustrations. Each illustration must be submitted electronically as a .tiff, .eps, or .jpg.
Images in the .jpg format must be of high quality and resolution. The lowest acceptable resolution for an image (example: a glossy photograph or an image from a book or magazine) is 600 dots per inch (dpi). The lowest acceptable resolution for line art is 1000 dpi. All images must be at least 6 x 8 inches. Images (glossy photograph or image of a page from a book or magazine) must be at least 600 dpi with a width of 3600 pixels and height of 4800 pixels. Illustrations (line art, wood craving, or ink drawing) must be at least 1000 dpi with a width of 6000 pixels and a height of 8000 pixels.
Unpublished
A manuscript that has been published or that is currently under consideration for publication elsewhere in either article or book form should not be submitted. The Journal will not consider submissions that duplicate other published works in either wording or substance.
Copyright
Articles that are accepted become the property of the Organization of American Historians. The OAH allows authors the free use of their materials as long as a decent interval elapses between publication in the Journal and subsequent publication.
Book Reviews
The Journal of American History aims to be a journal of record that enables readers to keep abreast of what is produced in the field of American history. By making readers aware of new books and helping them identify and assess those useful to them, the editorial board and staff of the JAH hope to assure its role as a journal of record and to sustain historical scholarship. The Journal does not accept unsolicited book reviews. To be considered a reviewer for the JAH, please contact the OAH.
Deciding What to Review
Our criteria in selecting books for review—American content, historical perspective, broad significance, originality, and scholarship—are evolving and flexible. The Journal’s book review editor may assign different weights to different criteria or follow a hunch that a book outside our usual purview deserves review. When a work falls at the edge of our field of interest, the book review editor asks: How many of the criteria does it meet? How well does it meet them? Such a book is more likely to be reviewed if it meets several criteria or fulfills one of them to spectacular effect.
Criteria
American Content
The JAH concentrates on reviewing books about the United States or areas that became part of it. Because we recognize the international dimensions of history, our definition of American history covers works addressing events or processes that begin, unfold, or end in the United States. It also includes comparative topics and the study of geographic and social borderlands where people, ideas, and institutions from the United States interact with those from elsewhere.
Historical Perspective
The JAH defines history as concerned with the past or with issues of change and continuity over time. Historical writing therefore includes works that deal with recent events and a range of human activities (for example, law, sports, religion, and art) so long as they are approached in relation to their time or their development over time.
Broad Significance
The JAH seeks to review books that show the significance of moments, persons, movements, or institutions by placing them in a historical context, connecting them with development over time, or relating them to ongoing discussions among historians. No topic is per se narrow. The amount and level of self-conscious contextualization and of reference to methods of analyzing the past may confer either narrowness or breadth.
Originality
The JAH concentrates on reviewing works of original scholarship. Most of the books we review are scholarly monographs, the main vehicle for the dissemination of original research and reflection in the field of American history.
Scholarship
The JAH concentrates on reviewing books that conform to core traditions of historical scholarship—research in primary sources, reference to historiography, engagement with cutting-edge issues. We value the scholarly apparatus of notes and bibliography as a sign of faithfulness to disciplinary traditions. But on occasion we review less heavily documented syntheses and extended essays by major historical thinkers.
Applying the Criteria
The JAH reviews approximately 600 books each year. Most of them, as works of original scholarship on U.S. history, unambiguously fulfill our criteria. Our aim here is to be inclusive. Books of other sorts, including those considered below, we review selectively.
Books In Other Disciplines
The JAH reviews some books in such related fields as sociology, anthropology, law, literature, and cultural studies if they meet some of our criteria (especially if they offer a historical perspective) or if they are likely to be of use to historians of the United States. The reviewer is usually a historian—sometimes one with a foot in another discipline—who can highlight the connection between the book and the concerns of historians.
Books On History That Occurred Outside The United States
The JAH reviews some books on non-U.S. history when their topics or approaches resonate with issues in American history. We expect reviewers to connect such books with the interests of our readers as historians of the United States.
Review Formats
It is JAH policy to review many books briefly rather than fewer books more extensively. JAH reviews generally vary in length from 500 to 1000 words. For reviews of monographs, the standard length is 500 words; for those of edited collections of essays, it is 600. To help readers see how fields are developing, we sometimes run joint reviews, which are at least 900 words long. To highlight works of particular significance, we publish feature reviews of at least 1000 words.
The JAH can best fulfill its goals if historians and other readers let us know of their needs and wishes. We welcome feedback on our book review policies.
Public History Reviews
Public History Reviews appear in the June and December issues of the Journal. These reviews first appeared in 1989 as Exhibition Reviews. In addition to assessments of museum exhibitions, other representations of history in the public sphere—living history projects, historical pageants and reenactments, memorials, historic preservation projects, educational programming, and virtual museums, as well as multidisciplinary projects—are encouraged. Comparative reviews and critical essays on the theory and practice of history exhibitions are also welcomed.
Catherine Gudis, National Museum of American History, University of California, Riverside, and Sam Vong, curator of Asian American Pacific History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, are the contributing editors for the Public History Reviews section. In making selections for inclusion in any given issue, the editors will be looking for balance in types and sizes of exhibitions and originating institutions, as well as geographical and topical range. They are interested in providing Journal readers with a sense of the visitor experience of exhibitions, seeing them as interpretative products for diverse public audiences.
The editors welcome suggestions; they may be reached at cagudis@ucr.edu and vongs@si.edu.
Movie Reviews
Premiering in December 1986 and running in the June and December issues of the Journal of American History, the “Movie Reviews” section features an eclectic program of a dozen or so motion pictures self-consciously driven by history. The format may be film, video, or digital; the forum exhibited, broadcast, or streamed; the genre the popular Hollywood blockbuster, the television miniseries, or the documentary feature. Recognizing the central role played by motion pictures in preserving, transmitting, and shaping American history, the section seeks to highlight films with special scholarly interest or pedagogical usefulness. The criticism accords with the purview of the journal: historical in cast but not blind to the ways cinematic style informs thematic meaning. In an age in which the photo-realistic image no longer requires a real-world referent, the power of the motion picture to bring the past before our eyes, always a fertile field for historical inquiry, warrants a level of scrutiny in line with its influence.
Thomas Doherty, professor of American studies at Brandeis University, is the editor of the “Movie Reviews” section of the Journal of American History. He can be reached at doherty@brandeis.edu and welcomes suggestions of films to review, names of screeners, and swag.
Digital History Reviews
"Web Site Reviews" first appeared in the June 2001 issue of the Journal of American History and became "Digital History Reviews" in the September 2013 issue.This section appears quarterly and normally runs two to five reviews.
Jeffrey W. McClurken, Chief of Staff to the President and professor of History and American Studies at the University of Mary Washington, is the contributing editor for the "Digital History Reviews" section of the Journal.
The editor welcomes suggestions and may be reached at jmcclurk@umw.edu.
Guidelines
Although these scholarly reviews of digital history projects follow the long tradition of reviewing books in the JAH—as well as the more recent practice of reviewing museum exhibitions, films, and textbooks—digital history reviews have some unique features. The guidelines below provide specific suggestions for dealing with this medium. Please feel free to write to me with any questions you might have, as well as suggested revisions and clarifications in the guidelines.
Digital history projects share a common medium, but they are quite diverse in their character. Reviewers need to keep that diversity in mind and to evaluate them on their own terms. Generally, most digital history projects fall into one of the following categories, although many sites combine different genres:
Archive: a site that provides a body of primary sources. Could also include collections of documents marked up in TEI or databases of materials.
Essay, Exhibit, Digital Narrative: something created or written specifically for the Web or with digital methods, that serves as a secondary source for interpreting the past by offering a historical narrative or argument. This category can also include maps, network visualizations, or other ways of representing historical data.
Teaching Resource: a site that provides online assignments, syllabi, other resources specifically geared toward using the Web, or digital apps for teaching, including educational history content for children or adults, pedagogical training tools, and outreach to the education community.
Tool: a downloadable, plugin, app, or online service that provides functionality related to creating, accessing, aggregating, or editing digital history content (rather than the content itself).
Gateway/Clearinghouse: a site that provides access to other websites or Internet-based resources.
Journal/Blog/Publication: any type of online publication.
Professional/Institutional Site: a site devoted to sharing information on a particular organization.
Digital Community: online social spaces that offer a virtual space for people to gather around a common experience, exhibition, or interest.
Podcasts: video and audio podcasts that engage audiences on historical topics and themes.
Audio/Application-based Tours: downloadable walking, car, or museum tours.
Games: challenging interactive activities that educate through competition or role playing, finding evidence defined by rules and linked to a specific outcome. Games can be online, peer-to- peer, or mobile.
Data sets, APIs: compilations of machine-readable data, shared in a commonly-accessible format, possibly through a CSV file or an Application Programming Interface (API), or data files, that allow others to make use of this data in their own digital history work.
Many projects to be reviewed will probably fall into one of the first three categories. The reviewing criteria will vary depending on the category into which the site falls. Thus, for example, an archival site should be evaluated based on the quality of the materials presented; the care with which they have been prepared and perhaps edited and introduced; the ease of navigation; and its usefulness to teachers, students, and scholars. How comprehensive is the archive? Are there biases in what has been included or excluded? Does the archive, in effect, offer a point of view or interpretation? As with other types of reviews, you are providing guidance to readers on the usefulness of the site in their teaching or scholarship. At the same time, you are participating in a community of critical discourse and you are trying to improve the level of work in the field. As you would do in a scholarly book review, then, you are speaking both to potential readers and to producers of similar work.
Even within a single category, the purposes of the digital history projects can vary significantly. An online exhibition or a digital narrative can be directed at a largely scholarly audience or a more broadly public audience. It would be unfair to fault a popularly oriented website for failing to trace the latest nuances in scholarship, but it would certainly be fair to note that the creators had not taken current scholarship into account. In general, then, online exhibitions and essays should be judged by the quality of their interpretation: What version of the past is presented? Is it grounded in historical scholarship? Is it original in its interpretation or mode of presentation? Again, the goal of the review is to provide guidance to potential readers (who might be reading in their roles as teachers, scholars, or citizens) and to raise the level of digitally based historical work.
Classroom-oriented projects would be judged by the quality of the scholarship underlying them, but naturally you would also want to evaluate the originality and usefulness of the pedagogical approach. Will this project be useful to teachers and students? At what level?
Reviews of digital history projects must necessarily address questions of navigation and presentation. To some extent, this process is the same as a book reviewer commenting on whether a book is well written or clearly organized. To be sure, the conventions of book publication are well enough established that book reviewers rarely comment on matters of navigation or design—although they do occasionally note a poorly prepared index or a work with excessive typographical errors. But in the digital world, which is an emerging medium that is visual (and often multimodal), issues of design and "interface" are necessarily more important. In this sense, digital history reviews share a great deal with film and exhibit reviews. In general, reviewers should consider what, if anything, the electronic medium adds to the historical work being presented. Does the digital format allow the creators of the project to do something different or better than what has been done in pre-digital formats (for example, books, films, museum exhibitions)? Have the creators of the project made effective use of the medium? How easy is it to find specific materials and to find your way around the project?
In summary, most reviews will address the following five areas:
Content: Is the scholarship sound and current? What is the interpretative point of view? How well is the content communicated to users?
Design: Does the information architecture clearly communicate what a user can find in the site? Does the structure make it easy for a user to navigate through the site? Do all of the sections of the project function as expected? Does it have a clear, effective, and original design? How accessible is the site for individuals of all abilities? If it is a website, is it responsive (i.e., tablet/mobile-friendly)?
Audience: Is the project directed at a clear audience? How well does the project address the needs of that audience?
Digital Media: Does it make effective use of digital media and new technology? Does it do something that could not be done in other media—print, exhibition, film?
Creators: Many digital projects include multiple contributors. Who worked on this project and in what capacity?
Although it won't be necessary for all sites, it may well be appropriate to comment on some of the more technical aspects of the site. What programming or coding choices have been made and how have they shaped the project that emerged? How are the materials of the project made available? [For example, how are the materials in a database project accessible? Via a search bar? In a downloadable format? In multiple machine-readable formats (CSV, JSON, API)?] Remember, however, that the Journal's audience may not be familiar with these terms, so plan on some context. If you have questions about when such comments are appropriate or how best to provide context, please ask me.
Because some digital history projects (largely archives) are vast, it is not possible to read every document or visit every link. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936–1940, at the Library of Congress's American Memory site, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html, includes 2,900 documents that range from 2,000 to 15,000 words in length. The reviewer could hardly be expected to read what probably amounts to the equivalent of 300 books. In such circumstances, some systematic sampling of the contents can substitute for a review of every single part. At the same time, the reviewer of a digital project should devote the same kind of close attention to the work as does a reviewer of a book, exhibition, or film. Because there is no easy way to indicate the size of a digital project (as you can note the number of pages in a book or the number of minutes in a film), you should try (ideally early in your review) to give readers some sense of the kinds of material found and the quantity of each.
One final way that digital history projects differ from books, exhibits, and films is that they are often works in progress. Thus, we ask that the headnote for the review indicate when you examined the project (this piece of the headnote could be a range of dates) just as you would indicate in reviewing a performance of a play. Where the project plans some significant further changes, you should say that in the review. If you think that it would make more sense to wait for further changes before reviewing the project, then please let us know and we will put the review off to a later date. If you feel that you need additional information about a project in order to complete a review, we would be happy to contact the author or creator on your behalf.
Because of our scholarly and pedagogical focus, our first priority in selecting reviewers is to find people whose scholarship and teaching parallels the subject areas of the project. We do not favor people who have some "technical" skill any more than we would expect book reviewers to know how books are typeset and printed. But we do have a preference—where possible—for reviewers who are familiar with what has been done in the digital world, since that will give them a comparative context for their evaluation. Nevertheless, we recognize that such familiarity is still only gradually emerging among professional historians, and some reviewers will be relatively new to such work.
Headings
Name of site/title. Address/URL. Who set it up? Who maintains it (if different)? Link to credit/about page. When reviewer consulted it.
Examples
Panoramic Maps, 1847–1929. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/pmhtml/panhome.html. Created and maintained by the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, https://www.loc.gov/collections/panoramic-maps/about-this-collection/. Reviewed Dec. 25, 2000–Jan. 2, 2001.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: March 25, 1911. http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University in cooperation with UNITE! (Union of Needle Trades, Industrial, and Textile Employees). Edited by Hope Nisly and Patricia Sione, http://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/aboutThisSite.html. Last site update April 21, 2000. Reviewed Dec. 20, 2000–Jan. 5, 2001.
The Programming Historian, http://programminghistorian.org/. Edited by Adam Crymble, Fred Gibbs, Allison Hegel, Caleb McDaniel, Ian Milligan, Miriam Posner, and William J. Turkel, http://programminghistorian.org/project-team. Reviewed Dec. 2015–Jan. 2016.
Jeffrey McClurken
Editor, Digital History Reviews, Journal of American History
Professor of History and American Studies
Chief of Staff, Office of the President
University of Mary Washington
http://mcclurken.org/
Twitter: @jmcclurken
Phone: 540-654- 1475
jmcclurk@umw.edu
Textbooks And Teaching
Since 1992, the annual "Textbooks and Teaching" section has sought to bring questions of teaching into the pages of the JAH. Originally designed to review the treatment of different historical fields and topics in American history textbooks, the section has in recent years focused more often on teaching practices, methods, and resources. In the words of former contributing editors Peter Filene and Peter Wood, the "Textbooks and Teaching" section aims "to provide a site where teachers exchange exciting ideas about how they convey history to their audiences inside classrooms as well as beyond."
Recent "Textbooks and Teaching" sections have explored the pedagogy and content of the U.S. history survey, the uses of digital technology in teaching U.S. history, the role of the "scholarship of teaching and learning" for studying our own teaching practices, and the historical skills and preconceptions of entering college students.
The "Textbooks and Teaching" section appears in the March issue of the JAH. The focus of the section is determined roughly one year prior to publication. Essays generally run 10-20 pages in length (double-spaced) and follow the same guidelines of format and citation as JAH articles. The section is also made freely available online along with additional resources and syallbi.
Laura Westhoff, Chair of the History Department at the University of Missouri St Louis, is the contributing editor for the "Textbooks and Teaching" section. She welcomes suggestions for annual themes, manuscripts related to the teaching of U.S. history, and proposals for submissions. Unsolicited manuscripts are reviewed with an eye toward whether they might fit within upcoming sections or help shape potential future themes. Professor Westhoff may be reached at WesthoffL@msx.umsl.edu.
Textbooks and Teaching 2009: Rethinking the History Curriculum
The theme of the March 2009 section is “rethinking the History curriculum”: not just one course or another (e.g., the survey), but attempts to re-imagine what a collegiate history education ought to provide for students.
Toward this end, we seek to gather several “reports from the field” from departments that have thought collectively about the History curriculum and its objectives, and have revised or replaced the traditional model that starts with surveys and moves to period or regional histories, then to specialized courses and perhaps a senior project.
Each piece should describe a department’s attempt to rethink the history curriculum, ideally after departmental consideration of various issues: objectives for students’ learning, especially methodological; the relationship between breadth and depth at different levels of curriculum; the relationship between a history curriculum and other institutional imperatives (e.g., attracting students to core-requirement or group-requirement courses, pressures to teach large courses, depending on the nature of the institution). The pieces could also describe the results of curricular change: has the revision accomplished the goals that the department imagined? What remains to be accomplished?
If your department has done this kind of collective thinking (even if the rethinking and curricular revision are still in progress) and wishes to share its process with readers of the Journal of American History, we welcome proposals and submissions. Please send email to casper@unr.edu, ideally by June 30, to indicate your interest in participating. (Full drafts will be due in early September.)
Potential Future Themes
The following list is not definitive or exhaustive. Suggestions are welcome.
- Teaching U.S. History outside the United States
- Developing the Next Generation of History Teachers
- Public History in the Undergraduate Experience
Author Toll Free Link and Discounts
All corresponding authors will be provided with a free access link to their article upon publication. The link will be sent via email to the article’s corresponding author who is free to share the link with any co-authors. Please see OUP’s Author Self-Archiving policy for more information regarding how this link may be publicly shared depending on the type of license under which the article has published.
All authors have the option to purchase up to 10 print copies of the issue in which they publish at a 50% discount. Orders should be placed through this order form. Orders must be made within 12 months of the online publication date.
