The Journal of Modern History

• 1. Introduction

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  The Journal of Modern History launched in 1929 with a mandate that few academic publications have held so steadily: to make sense of Europe from the age of exploration to the present day. Its geographical reach runs from the United Kingdom through the European continent all the way to Russia and the Balkans. That scope raises an immediate question. What does it mean to write the history of a civilization in motion, one that kept spilling beyond its own borders into empires and overseas territories? That is the question the journal has been asking, one article at a time, for nearly a century. And behind the journal's longevity stands a cast of editors, scholars, and even a prize named for one of its founding figures, a man whose students thought so well of him that they established a cash award in his name.

• 2. A Century of European History

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  Roughly the year 1500 marks where the journal's coverage begins, placing the Renaissance, the Reformations, and the first European voyages to the Americas all within its purview. Published by the University of Chicago Press as a quarterly peer-reviewed journal, each issue submits its articles to scrutiny before a word reaches readers. The scope is not narrowly political. Intellectual and cultural history share equal standing with political events, so a reader might find an essay on Enlightenment philosophy sitting beside one on a nineteenth-century treaty. The journal also publishes book reviews, and on occasion it has devoted entire special issues to a single focused topic, allowing scholars to examine one problem from multiple angles at once.

• 3. The Editors Who Shaped It

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  Today the journal is coedited by John W. Boyer, Jan E. Goldstein, and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, all at the University of Chicago. That trio carries forward a lineage of distinguished predecessors. Sheila Fitzpatrick, one of the foremost historians of Soviet Russia, held the editorial position. Hanna Gray, who would later serve as president of the University of Chicago, was also among the journal's past editors. William Hardy McNeill, whose sweeping comparative histories reshaped how scholars thought about world civilizations, guided the journal as well. Bernadotte Schmitt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the origins of the First World War, rounds out that earlier editorial company. The thread connecting them is a commitment to European history read at the widest possible angle.

• 4. Chester Penn Higby and His Prize

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  Chester Penn Higby was born in 1886 and died in 1966, and in between he built a career that left a permanent mark on the journal he helped found. He joined the history faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1927 and remained there until he retired in 1956, a tenure of nearly three decades. He also served as the first president of the Modern European History Section of the American Historical Association, a role that placed him at the center of the discipline's professional organization. When he retired, a group of his former students pooled resources to establish a trust fund, and from that fund came a cash prize awarded for the best article published in the journal. The prize carries his name, and it is awarded during even-numbered years. Past recipients include Jan E. Goldstein, William W. Hagen, Susan Pedersen, and Heinrich August Winkler, names that span subdisciplines from French intellectual history to German social history.