Journal of the History of Ideas

• 1. Introduction

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  The Journal of the History of Ideas was founded in 1940 by two scholars who believed that ideas themselves had a history worth tracing. Arthur Oncken Lovejoy and Philip P. Wiener launched it as a space where philosophy, literature, the arts, science, religion, and political thought could be examined not as separate disciplines but as interwoven currents of human thinking. What kind of publication takes all of those fields as its province? How do you write the history of an idea? And what does it mean for a journal, now more than eight decades old, to still be shaping the way scholars think about the past? Those are the questions this documentary explores.

• 2. A Journal Across Disciplines

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  Intellectual history, as the Journal practices it, refuses the borders that normally divide academic life. Philosophy sits alongside literature. Natural science shares space with political thought. The journal's founding vision was that ideas migrate across these fields, and that tracking those migrations is a form of scholarship in its own right. Conceptual history, another strand the journal covers, asks how the meaning of a single word or concept shifts across time and culture. Religion and the social sciences round out a remarkably broad mandate. That breadth has made the Journal a home for scholars who find single-discipline journals too narrow for their questions.

• 3. From Print to JSTOR

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  Since 2006, the University of Pennsylvania Press has published the journal, lending it the institutional weight of one of America's oldest universities. Before that, the journal had a different publishing home, but the Press brought it into a stable long-term arrangement. Readers today can reach current issues through Project MUSE, while older issues are preserved and searchable through JSTOR. That dual-platform approach means the journal's full run, stretching back to 1940, is accessible to researchers anywhere with library access. Quarterly publication has been the journal's rhythm throughout its history, a pace that allows for long-form peer-reviewed articles rather than the shorter, faster formats that digital culture has encouraged elsewhere.

• 4. Editors Past and Present

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  Arthur Lovejoy himself served as an early editor, a role that let him shape the journal he had co-founded. The editorial lineage that followed him reads like a roster of major figures in twentieth-century intellectual life: John Herman Randall, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Philip P. Wiener, Donald Kelley, Lewis White Beck, and Anthony Grafton all held distinguished positions at the journal. The current editors-in-chief bring the journal into the twenty-first century with affiliations that span Harvard University, New York University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Oxford, and Middlebury College. Joyce Chaplin, Stefanos Geroulanos, Adom Getachew, Ann E. Moyer, Sophie Smith, and Don Wyatt now share editorial leadership, a collaborative model that reflects the journal's commitment to covering an unusually wide intellectual terrain.

• 5. The Blog and Beyond

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  In 2015, the journal added something its founders could not have imagined: a blog. The blog publishes short articles and interviews related to intellectual history, reaching audiences who may encounter a topic there before deciding to seek out a full peer-reviewed article. That turn toward shorter, more immediate writing is a deliberate complement to the journal's long-form tradition, not a replacement for it. The interviews give working scholars a chance to explain their ideas in plain terms. For a journal devoted to how ideas move through history, the blog is itself an experiment in how scholarly ideas move through a changed media landscape.