No manuscript will be considered if it has been published in some form before, if it is soon to be published elsewhere, or if it is under consideration by another journal or press.
Please submit manuscripts electronically as email attachments in Word to Jay Aja (jayaja@wm.edu), Editorial Coordinator. We will send the essay electronically to referees. (Referees have strict instructions not to circulate, quote from, or cite a submitted manuscript.)
Manuscripts should not exceed ten thousand words, excluding notes, tables, and figures. The notes, in total, should not exceed five thousand words.
Additional Formats
We also publish shorter Sources and Interpretations pieces of approximately six thousand words (plus another three thousand words in the notes) that are tightly focused on a document, text, image, or material object, placing the primary source in historical context and connecting the interpretation to significant historiographical questions.
We also are pleased to offer a new section, Methods and Practices, which will be a companion to, and an expansion on, our Sources and Interpretations article genre. Articles published in Methods and Practices can explore new methodologies or resituate more familiar ones in new contexts. Alternatively, authors can use these articles to discuss their practice as researchers and writers, experiment with new forms or styles, or point to novel paths forward for the field. These articles may be grounded in archival research, but many will not be, and the nature of an author’s archive will depend on the goals of their essay. Methods and Practices articles will also be approximately six thousand words (plus another three thousand words in the notes).
For these additional formats, depending on the project’s needs, authors should feel free to adopt a writing style that is more conversational, interrogative, speculative, or polemical than is typical of academic articles. All authors, however, must work to situate their project in a clear and recognizable way within the field’s ongoing conversations.
All Sources and Interpretations and Methods and Practices articles will be peer-reviewed.
For more information on the submission and publication processes: