This year it was my turn to represent KNHG and BMGN at the Annual Meeting of our American sister organization, the American Historical Association (AHA). As every year, this is a mastodon of a conference, both in terms of location (the lavish Hilton Hotel Midtown with its numerous ballrooms – the largest and one of the tallest hotels in New York) and in terms of size: there were as many as 4.000 participating professional historians, from academics and museum staff, to archivists and lecturers.
For a few years now, the AHA has abandoned the idea of an overarching conference theme. During this year’s edition, this also resulted in a flood of sessions on historical research and teaching, archives and public history, as well as on the ethical standards of the profession and on the attitudes of American historians toward Gaza and Trump. As the Meeting began the day after New Year’s Day and ended two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, one sensed in the corridors both new energy and a great fear for the future.
This year more than ever, the abandonment of an overarching theme ensured that currently very popular research topics such as slavery and colonial history dominated the conference. I myself sat open-mouthed listening to a high-level dissection of Catherine Hall’s book on Edward Long by Vincent Aaron Brown and Sasha Turner, or to the inspiring reflections of Kenneth Pomeranz, Antoinette Burton and Benjamin Talton on the state of world history. This dominance of (post)colonial history is, of course, a needed corrective to the average research presented twenty years ago, but it was noticeable that other topics such as religious, local and socioeconomic history and history of science were conspicuously absent – and the same was strangely true of a thriving field such as ecological history.
In addition to these subject matter sessions, the staff of AHA’s own journal, the American Historical Review (AHR), organized panels on the workings of historical journals aimed at editors, academic editors and authors, which are always inspiring to me as managing editor of BMGN. These sessions proved to contain a common thread this year: many American historical journals, including the AHR, want to attract new (often younger) authors and new readerships and thus subscribers. This ambition to broaden leads to the introduction of new publication formats that deviate from the classic 8.000-word academic research article, such as blogs, shorter essays, roundtables, discussion forums, image stories and videos.
Indeed, under editor Mark Philip Bradley, the AHR has taken on a more explicit goal of publishing all forms of history practice, whether they take place in museums, the heritage world, universities, archives, the art world or secondary education. To this end, the experimental section AHR History Lab was created in 2022, presenting collaborations that aim to renew the practice of history in terms of content, form or method. In a 2024 AHR History Lab, for example, experts on war and peace studies and peace activists discussed the interactions between historical knowledge production and peace activism in practice.
This inclusive approach to the AHR is extremely fascinating, but it also raised questions for me about the precise identity of the journal. Does the AHR now want to be a highly scholarly journal that uses academic criteria, and where, despite all ambitions for broadening, the classic academic research article is still the most “prestigious” publication? Or is it a journal that truly embraces all forms of historiography, while also considering new standards contributions should meet? Consequently, it made sense that in one of the sessions we ended up with the question of how to put these different types of publications on equal footing, and how authors view this. Setting up separate sections within the AHR for non-academic historiography, in which different criteria and assessment procedures apply than for the academic research article, may result in the idea that the academic article and its criteria remain the standard, and that other types of publications come across as ‘second best’. On the other hand, a remarkable evolution is that the AHR currently receives more submissions for the History Lab than for the classic research article. The latter may also be due to the fact that a research article at the AHR must pass very rigorous peer review (four reviewers – as many as six a few years ago) and the turnaround time is about three years.
In short, participating in this Annual Meeting made me think again about the exact identity and form of BMGN. Unlike the AHR, BMGN clearly chooses to adhere more strongly to its academic identity. Through its longstanding publication formats such as the forum and the discussion file, the editors do want to facilitate topical discussions among academic historians, and sometimes with professional historians in the broader field. And unlike the AHR, BMGN seeks new authors and audiences primarily through diamond open access and online innovations. BMGN‘s recently developed HTML format, for example, allows academic research to be presented more transparently, better and in a more diverse way through interactive visualizations and extensive methodological explanations. Thus, the question of whether and how BMGN, through its publications, has the task of connecting academic historiography and the broader practice of history more strongly remains.
Tessa Lobbes, managing editor BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review