Journal of Contemporary History

• 1. Introduction

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  The Journal of Contemporary History arrived in 1966 with a simple but ambitious premise: that the recent past, stretching from 1930 to the present, deserved the same rigorous scholarly treatment as ancient empires or medieval kingdoms. Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse founded the journal together, bringing to it their combined expertise in modern European history at a moment when the events of the Second World War and the Cold War were still fresh in living memory. What made this publication unusual was not just its focus on recent decades, but its refusal to draw borders around any single country or region. Every corner of the world, from the first year of its existence, was fair territory. The journal that Laqueur and Mosse built would go on to attract serious attention from scholars and readers across the English-speaking world.

• 2. Founders and Origins

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  Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse were the architects of everything the journal became in its early decades. Their decision to establish the publication in 1966 placed it at a fascinating crossroads: historians were only then beginning to treat the post-1930 period as legitimate scholarly ground rather than journalism in disguise. The journal launched under the Weidenfeld and Nicolson imprint, a London publisher known for serious nonfiction. That arrangement lasted only six years. In 1972, SAGE Publications acquired the journal, moving it into the orbit of a company that would become one of the dominant forces in academic publishing. Today the journal is led by Richard J. Evans of the University of Cambridge and Mary C. Neuburger of the University of Texas at Austin, a pairing that reflects the journal's continuing commitment to transatlantic scholarly conversation.

• 3. Scope and Scholarly Range

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  Since 1930 is where this journal begins, and the present day is where it ends, but within that span the range of approaches is deliberately wide. Scholarly articles, review articles, and book reviews all appear in its quarterly issues, and the editors have never restricted themselves to one historical method. Social history sits alongside diplomatic history; economic analysis shares pages with intellectual and cultural approaches. No country or region of the world is excluded so long as the events fall within living memory. That geographic openness sets it apart from many journals that define themselves by a single national tradition or regional specialization. The journal also produces special issues, which can arise either from academic conferences or from proposals submitted by outside scholars, giving the publication a degree of responsiveness to emerging debates in the field.

• 4. Evolving Format

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  In 2008, the Journal of Contemporary History expanded its format in a way that many readers noticed immediately. Before that year, the publication had focused primarily on review articles, which are longer essays covering several books within a single critical argument. From 2008 onward, it also began publishing reviews of individual books, a format common to many journals but previously absent here. That addition gave historians a faster path to having their monographs assessed in print and gave readers a more granular sense of what was being published across the field. The change did not displace the longer review articles; both formats now coexist in the journal's pages, offering two distinct registers of critical engagement with contemporary historical scholarship.

• 5. Standing and Impact

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  The Times Literary Supplement called the Journal of Contemporary History "one of the outstanding learned journals of history in the English-speaking world," a judgment that carries weight given that publication's long record of evaluating scholarly work. A separate assessment described it as "an excellent international publication," pointing to its reach beyond any single national audience. Measured by the metrics that academic institutions use, the journal ranked 22nd out of 95 journals in the History category according to the Journal Citation Reports, with a 2018 impact factor of 0.769. It is abstracted and indexed in both Scopus and the Social Sciences Citation Index, two of the major databases that determine whether a journal's content is discoverable by researchers worldwide. That combination of critical praise and indexing coverage has helped the journal maintain a presence in university libraries and graduate reading lists across multiple decades.