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Fifty Years Flourishing

Our vision, fifty years ago, was to create a journal of history that explicitly would emphasize new and innovative methods of uncovering the past. We were ecumenical and catholic about approaches social scientific, scientific, and humane so long as they offered novel, preferably breakthrough, insights and added measurably to existing knowledge. We welcomed articles and research notes introducing specific techniques or technologies of likely value to historians. We were purposely unbounded geographically and temporally, the better to explore innovative analyses, unusual or unexpected subjects, and to invite collaboration across disciplines and topics. We eschewed intellectual history and purely narrative recounting; existing journals served those pursuits well. Looking back, as the several especially commissioned fifty-year articles that have appeared in this half-century volume of the JIH reveal, we appear to have fulfilled our self-described mandate. Through articles, research notes, review essays, extensive reviews of major books, and—not least—special issues, many of which derived from conferences created by the JIH, we have brought interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and multidisciplinary practice to the writing and practice of history. Whether in the employment of quantitative or demographical methods for historical purposes, or in the consideration of astronomical, dendrological, or glaciochemical insights when exploring the impact of climate on history, the JIH has both brought varied expertise and heuristic experiences to bear on common unsolved problems and stimulated significant new lines of critical research. From very early attention to the American Revolution, family history, the census, and psychobiography to special issues on “the new history,” social capital, geospatial analytics, environmental history, industrialization, and “the origins of war,” the JIH has largely been ahead of its time, focusing attention across disciplines on mutual problems that had elsewhere been previously explored only tentatively, The JIH, in line with its original vision, stimulated whole bodies of new inquiry and directed historians and social scientists to a range of topics in need of examination and explanation. The special articles in this issue of the JIH and in other issues published in volume 50 examine what the JIH has accomplished (and failed to accomplish)