With pride, commitment, an appreciation of its distinguished past, and great hopes for its future, we begin our editorship of the HAHR. In bringing the journal north of the Mason-Dixon Line for the first time in decades, we are mindful of the responsibilities such stewardship entails. Ours is the oldest and most prestigious journal of Latin American history in the English language. During our tenure at Yale we hope to maintain the standards of excellence achieved by our distant and more recent predecessors, and also to move the HAHR in new directions. We are well aware that during our editorship the journal will move into a new century and millennium.
The electronic information age has made communication much more rapid and presented us with new opportunities and challenges. We hope to harness the new technologies to the entire editorial process, enhancing communication with outside reviewers and promoting shorter “turn-around” times for both articles and book reviews. The journal’s new design, which is more readable and showcases on our portada images from some of the hemisphere’s most creative documentary photographers, further illustrates the benefits of these technologies. We have also begun to explore with Duke University Press the possibilities of placing back issues of the journal on CD-ROM.
In the same spirit, and recognizing that the HAHR is the North American journal that circulates most widely among our colleagues from Mexico to Argentina, we intend to engage Latin American scholars more fully in the work of the journal. Our predecessors at Florida International University dramatically increased the number of Latin American colleagues contributing to the HAHR as authors and reviewers. We plan to take the process a step further, inviting the collaboration of Latin American scholars, thereby ensuring that the journal receives on a regular basis the best manuscripts and books from throughout the hemisphere. Beginning in 1998, we will initiate the process of selecting distinguished Latin American historians as members of the journal’s editorial board.
The HAHR has a venerable tradition of soliciting the best work in the field across thematic, chronological, regional, and methodological specializations. This is a tradition we intend to continue. At the same time, we hope to deepen the effort to encourage the publication of more diverse, interdisciplinary perspectives in the social sciences and humanities. The HAHR should be a journal of preference for many of our most innovative colleagues who in recent years have opted to publish their theoretically and comparatively informed work in journals such as the Latin American Research Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and the Journal of Historical Sociology. We hope to win many of them back to the HAHR.
To further this goal, we plan to organize one issue per year around provocative themes and new theoretical and methodological approaches. These special issues will constitute forums for the dissemination of important work by both established historians and younger scholars. We will initiate this program in November 1998 with an issue devoted to the centenary of the so-called Spanish-American War—an issue that will include articles on Cuba and Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1999 we will feature a forum of commentary and debate on the relevance of postmodernism and cultural studies approaches to Mexico’s “new cultural history.” An issue is also being planned for the year 2000 to acknowledge the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese “discovery” of Brazil and unveil new research on that complex encounter. Duke University Press has suggested the possibility of producing brief, free-standing volumes based on these and other provocative themes—volumes geared particularly to the undergraduate and graduate classroom. In the same spirit of noting new trends and providing a baseline for future research, we also have plans to commission a select number of historiographical essays by senior and established scholars in strategic subfields.
Finally, we will introduce some changes in the journal’s book review section. The HAHR has served as the journal of record for reviews in our field and will continue to do so. We will continue to include books in related fields and disciplines that are of direct interest to historians of Latin America. We are prepared, however, to forego review of volumes more tenuously related to the field in order to provide our reviewers with additional space for books squarely within our purview. Moreover, we intend to initiate “featured reviews” of a few select books that warrant special attention and scrutiny and, occasionally, to cluster books in a single, comparative review.
As we begin our nuevo régimen, we express deep appreciation to our predecessor, Mark Szuchman, and his FIU team for making the editorial transition relatively easy and enjoyable. We also acknowledge the timely encouragement and guidance of Duke University Press in the formulation of our new agenda. We are committed to the tradition of excellence that readers have come to expect from the HAHR and pledge to keep the journal alive to new currents and approaches. We welcome the suggestions and advice of our readers—and their criticisms as well. For if it is to thrive in the new millennium, our journal must remain a truly collaborative effort.
