Interview with George Huppert, Editor of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

Earlier in the month I spoke to George Huppert (University of Illinois at Chicago) about editing the Journal of the Historical Society. Huppert and associate

editor Scott Hovey aim to reach specialists and nonspecialists alike. The journal "presents fresh historical research in a non-pedantic way and provides a genuine opening to worldwide trends in historical research."

In the video embedded here I ask Huppert about the kinds of articles he seeks out and the models he looks to for the journal. He describes the ways in which the historian Lucien Febvre has informed his work and he notes the influence of the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale.

Huppert is a social historian of early modern Europe. He has written extensively on the Renaissance, humanism, the history of philosophy, and the annales school. He is the author of a variety of articles and books, including The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes: An Essay on the Definition of Elites in Renaissance France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Public Schools in Renaissance France (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984); After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and The Style of Paris: Renaissance Origins of the French Enlightenment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

Season's Readings: Give the Gift of Historical Society Membership and Two Books for Only $50

With the holiday season here, consider giving a friend, colleague, student, or loved one the gift of membership in the Historical Society.

For just $50 you can sign up a friend to receive one-year subscriptions to both the Journal of the Historical Society and Historically Speaking. Your gift is tax deductible. The Historical Society is a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization.

We want to make this offer even more attractive by adding two volumes from an exciting new series of books edited by Historically Speaking editors Donald Yerxa and Randall Stephens. Historians in Conversation, published by the University of South Carolina Press, brings together interviews, essays, and forums from Historically Speaking that speak to a common theme (military history, historiography, early America, Africa and the Atlantic World, and more). These books are terrific teaching tools. Eight volumes have been published thus far, and we will send a choice of two to the recipient of your gift subscription.

Order by using this secure web form: www.bu.edu/historic/gift

New Issue of the Journal of the Historical Society

The September issue of the Journal of the Historical Society has hit the streets/shelves. Copies are available from Wiley. Subscribe to THS and receive four issues/year plus five issues of Historically Speaking. This new issue of the journal includes a forum on Vernon Burton's The Age of Lincoln, along with essays on abolitionism, Christian missions, and the history of medicine.

The Journal of the Historical Society, September 2009
Contents

"Introduction to the Forum on The Age of Lincoln"
Eric Arnesen

"Vernon Burton's The Age of Lincoln: A New Approach to Religion, Reform, and Abolitionism"
Bertram Wyatt-Brown

"'I Always Thought 'Dixie' One of the Best Tunes I Ever Heard': Lincoln's Claims on the South and the South's Claims on Lincoln"
Stephen Berry

"The Southern Abraham?"
David Moltke-Hansen

"Author's Response to the Southern Intellectual History Circle Forum on The Age of Lincoln"
Orville Vernon Burton

"Confronting Abolitionism: Bishop John England, American Catholicism, and Slavery"
Adam L. Tate

"They Twain Shall be One Flesh: The Courtship and Marriage of Thomas Hudson and Mary Aulick, Baptist Missionaries to China in the 1890s"
Keith Harper

"Reticence in Action: The Antisepsis Controversy"
Stewart Justman

New Issue of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

The new issue of the Journal of the Historical Society has been out for a couple weeks. Editor George Huppert and managing editor Scott Hovey continue to publish high quality, accessible essays with distinctly international/transnational themes. Full versions of the essays can be read at the Wiley site. If you can't access material at Wiley, download some featured essays here.

The Journal of the Historical Society, Volume 9 Issue 2 (June 2009)

"On Primo Levi, Richard Serra, and the Concept of History"
Johan Åhr

"Modernization, Socialism, and Higher Education in Mexico: The Instituto para Hijos de Trabajadores"
Ana María Kapelusz-Poppi

"A Modern Monarch: Dom Pedro II's Visit to the United States in 1876"
Teresa Cribelli

"Havana During the Nineteenth Century: A Perspective from Its Spanish Immigrants"
Translated by Franklin W. Knight
Rosario Márquez Macías

"'French' Immigrants in Naples, 1806–1860"
Marco Rovinello

The September issue of the journal will include essays by Keith Harper on Baptist missionaries in love; Stewart Justman on antisepsis and Victorian reticence; Adam L. Tate on Bishop John England, abolitionism, and Catholicism in the American South; and a forum on The Age of Lincoln, by Orville Vernon Burton with Eric Arnesen, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Stephen Berry, David Moltke-Hansen.

Free Articles from the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

The Wiley-Blackwell website has offered five articles from The Journal of the Historical Society free of charge. Under the able direction of George Huppert (editor) and Scott Hovey (managing editor), the journal ranges broadly over time and thematic focus. The JHS is one of the only publications that is accessible to the non-specialist educated reader who is interested in "worldwide trends in historical research." For this reason the TLS wrote that the journal published "essays that represent history as it should be." It also praised the JHS for paying "serious attention to . . . serious subjects." Take, for instance, Herman Ooms’ 2005 essay, "Early Modern Japanese Intellectual History: USA, France, and Germany." Like a number of other articles in the JHS, it is a readable, fascinating account of a field that few non-specialists know anything about:

The field of intellectual history of Japan’s Early Modern or Tokugawa period (1600–1868) as practiced in the United States has a unique characteristic. It has produced what one could call, with only a slight exaggeration, an actual subfield of state-of-the-art reflective writing. An unusual number of scholars are keeping themselves busy, at one point or another, surveying the field or, putting it less technically, sizing up their colleagues. An outsider might wonder whether there are actually not more reflecting scholars than practicing historians. And indeed, one could conclude that the United States is running out of scholars that are available for this peculiar subfield because the last one to engage in it (in 2002), James McMullen, is British. Between 1996 and 2002 over half a dozen publications, averaging one a year, addressed in one form or another the “state of the field.” >>> read the complete article here

See this Wiley-Blackwell page for other free articles.

The Journal of the Historical Society
Table of contents, March 2009

"Was Hitler a Riddle?"
Abraham Ascher

"Government, Press, and Subversion in Russia, 1906–19171"
Jonathan W. Daly

"Santa Anna Never Had an iPhone: Some Thoughts on the Price of Peace and the Financial Misfortunes of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848"
Richard J. Salvucci

"The Great Migration and the Literary Imagination"
Steven A. Reich

"Antebellum South Carolina Reconsidered: The Libertarian World of Robert J. Turnbull"
Raymond James Krohn