Guidelines for the AHR

Article Submissions

Book Reviewing

Style Sheet for Article Authors

Guidelines for Submitting Manuscripts to the AHR

Manuscripts may be sent to the Editor, American Historical Review, 914 Atwater, Bloomington, Indiana 47401. Submissions by mail sent from the North American continent should include four copies of the complete text and two copies if from abroad. Submissions by attachment are our preference. Our e-mail address is ahr@indiana.edu. Especially helpful are word-processed files supported by WIN2000 or NT and in Microsoft Word. (If you use another program, we can probably convert it. To check if your file is compatible, contact our Production Manager at 812-855-7609.) All texts, whether paper or electronic, should be double-spaced with generous margins, including quotations and footnotes. Footnotes should be numbered consecutively throughout and should appear in a separate section at the end of the text. The editors prefer to work with manuscripts that are no more than 8,000 words in length, not counting notes, tables, and charts. The editors appreciate full addresses, including e-mail, in all correspondence.

No manuscripts will be considered for publication if it is concurrently under consideration by another journal or press or if it has been published or is soon to be published elsewhere. Both restrictions apply to the substance as well as to the exact wording of the manuscript. If the manuscript is accepted, the editors expect that its appearance in the Review will precede republication of the essay, or any significant part thereof, in another work.

Other guidelines for the preparation of manuscripts for submission to and publication in the AHR can be found in the style sheet. Articles will be edited to conform to AHR style in matters of punctuation, capitalization, and the like. The editors may suggest other changes in the interest of clarity and economy of expression; such changes are not made without consultation with authors. The editors are the final arbiters of length, grammar, and usage.

Submitting Articles to the AHR

 The editors of the AHR, like editors of other historical journals, seek articles that are new in content and interpretation and make a fresh contribution to historical knowledge. Our principal consideration in determining whether an article should be published is its appropriateness to the distinctive audience of the AHR. Because our readers embrace all fields of history and are located throughout the world, the AHR has a responsibility to publish essays that reach beyond the specialties that have enlivened yet also fragmented the discipline in recent years. Consequently, the editors seek manuscripts that can engage the common interests of as many historians as possible.

 We realize that the historical scholarship likely to interest a large and diverse readership can be written in many ways. The editors try to identify those essays that demonstrate an author's command of a specific subject. They should also have the potential to communicate its implications to scholars working in other fields. Manuscripts that have an appeal outside their particular specialty may well have a very specific subject matter. Or they may effectively demonstrate a methodology that other scholars might find useful even though the subject matter of the essay itself is not directly in their field. Manuscripts likely to engage common concerns may also be explicit discussions of historical methodology or review essays that analyze current trends in particular fields of historical inquiry.

 Given our mandate to engage the interests of the entire discipline, we also seek an array of articles that collectively addresses the spatial, temporal, and thematic dimensions of contemporary historical inquiry. Over the century since its creation, the AHR has published essays primarily on the history of the United States and Western Europe because these articles form the bulk of our submissions. Although we welcome such manuscripts, the editors have also actively encouraged, and continue to encourage, the submission of manuscripts on Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. We now also renew our commitment to understanding the past broadly not just in terms of geography but also in terms of time and periods. In an era when academic and popular conceptions of history seem to be more and more presentist and most manuscripts sent to the AHR examine the modern world, we invite the submission of manuscripts in ancient, medieval, and early modern history. Thematically, an earlier concentration on political history has been broadened in the AHR (as elsewhere in the discipline) with a diverse array of topics. Over the last ten years, intellectual history and historiography have obtained a more prominent place in our pages, as have women's history and the history of race relations in America and the modern world. The editors hope that work on these topics will continue to be submitted, as well as essays that extend these inquiries into topics such as cultural history, gender history, and the history of ethnicity.

 As we strive to fulfill our mandate to a diverse readership with a balanced presentation of fields and subjects, the editors construct the article section by applying these standards to the approximately 250 manuscripts that are submitted to the AHR each year. The vast majority of these essays are unsolicited, but we do on occasion commission articles on particular topics as well as review essays and commentaries for AHR Forums. We are able to publish approximately one tenth of the manuscripts we receive. These articles are selected through a rigorous review process. Every manuscript is evaluated by the AHR staff. Those with the greatest promise are sent to members of the AHR Board of Editors for further review. Upon recommendation by board members, essays are then sent to specialists for a final, anonymous review. All reviews are designed not only to evaluate the manuscript's suitability for publication in the AHR but also to help authors clarify their argument and explain its broader implications. Approximately one third of the manuscripts experience this entire evaluation process. Those that we select to publish then often undergo a final round of revision and reevaluation. As a consequence of our evaluation methods, every article published in the AHR has been reviewed by at least six scholars, and often more. However, the editors are committed to a timely reviewing process. We do not maintain a lengthy backlog of articles, and we try to reach a decision about each manuscript within six months of its submission. Though the process is rigorous, most authors are pleased with the results of these procedures, and many of their articles later win prizes.

 As a final guide to publishing articles in the AHR, the editors would like to repeat the advice our predecessors printed on these pages twenty-five years ago: "The AHR does not stand at the top of a pyramid of scholarly prestige, automatically to be tried first by an ambitious author before he moves on to a 'lesser' journal. Rather, the AHR, with certain other general periodicals, has another purpose than the specialized journals, defined--in both a limiting and a liberating sense--by its readership. It is concerned with large, persistent themes and genuine, broadly interesting innovation; it is a vehicle for general scholarly communication or for specialized studies that transcend the normal boundaries or expectations of their fields. It therefore stands as testimony, however fragmented and isolated the various fields of history sometimes seem, to the essential unity of the profession."

 R. K. Webb, et al., "Articles for the AHR: An Editorial," AHR, 75 (October 1970): 1580.

 © American Historical Association

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Updated 10/02/06