Since its inception in 2018, Modern American History (MAH) has been the go-to journal for researchers and readers exploring any facet of twentieth-century U.S. history. When Cambridge University Press began exploring the possibility of supporting a journal that could speak directly to historians working across a range of subfields under the broad canopy of “modern American history,” it hoped to create a clearinghouse for and meeting place of the very best scholarship.
Under the leadership of founding executive editors Brooke L. Blower and Sarah T. Phillips, MAH more than achieved that goal. Brooke, Sarah, and their team at Boston University immediately set out to recruit an editorial board populated by the preeminent minds in the business. With the board's help they attracted top-notch research articles dealing with a wide range of subjects, from political economy and development of the modern state to U.S. empire and its encounters with the world; urban politics to matters of ecology and environment; religious and cultural change; as well as dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the national experience. Virtually all subsets of modern U.S. history garnered close attention in the issues that Brooke and Sarah's team ushered into production. Meanwhile, they distinguished MAH from other leading journals through their creation of a below-the-fold “Features” section. Over the past few years, these varied venues have allowed students of history to debate and rethink the recent past; provided opportunities for practitioners of the historian's craft to ruminate on the nuts-and-bolts—as well as big-picture ramifications—of good writing; and stimulated trailblazing conversations about American history's direct bearing on the issues, tensions, and developments that define our present moment. With their term as co-editors now complete, we want to acknowledge and thank Brooke and Sarah for all of their intellectual and logistical labor to make MAH a staple of our profession, and to celebrate their invaluable contributions to the field of U.S. history as a whole.
As we look ahead to MAH's next steps, our pledge is to do our best to build on the solid foundation our predecessors provided by continuing to enlist and engage the most innovative scholars and scholarship in our field. We also hope to continue to extend the canopy of modern U.S. history by making the journal accessible to scholars who are working at all career stages, in all types of academic and public settings, and from international as well as U.S.-based institutions of learning. And we want to ensure that the journal continues to be an essential publication for anyone interested in reading and learning about (and teaching!) the United States' recent past through perspectives that are rich in diversity and excitingly broad and inclusive in range. MAH is uniquely positioned to serve the historical community at a critical juncture in debates about the history of the United States, and we are excited to see where that approach will take us in the coming years.
We thank you for your support of MAH and its mission, and we hope that you will consider contributing your own scholarly insights to it soon!
