Journal of the Southwest was founded in 1959 as Arizona and the West, the first journal of Western American history in the United States, and began publishing in its current format in 1987 as a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed quarterly dedicated to an integrated regional study of the American Southwest and northern Mexico. For more than half a century it has stood alone in general academic publishing: an award-winning journal representing with defining scholarship and high production values a transborder region of world-historical significance, publishing broadly across disciplines including intellectual and social history, anthropology, architecture, folklore, politics, Borderlands studies, literature, photography, geography, and natural history and ecology.