Editor's Page

Editor’s Page First an announcement: Starting with 2011, electronic access to the Michigan Historical Review will come through a new Current Scholarship Program (CSP) being launched by JSTOR. Print publication will go on as always, and readers of paper copies will see no change of any sort. At present, electronic access to current issues is provided by the History Cooperative. While the History Cooperative has done its member journals a great service in providing current issues online to institutional subscribers, the Review has had to absorb some moderately significant costs. Even so, the University of Illinois Press, which provided all the technical service and expertise, found it could no longer cover costs that exceeded the fees being paid by member journals. The new CSP will cover costs through a commission on electronic subscriptions but will furnish some major advantages for online users. Back issues of the MHR are already available through 2004 in JSTOR; electronic subscribers through the CSP will receive, as a bonus, the remaining back issues up through 2010. Thus readers online using CSP from 2011 onward will have access to all back and current files of the Michigan Historical Review. As often is the case, this issue’s articles illustrate the broad range of historians’ interests today. Jake Hall’s prize-winning essay seeks, as histories of labor often do, a story of organized labor’s success amid adversity and finds at least a modest triumph at an unlikely time and place—Detroit around 1920. We are, incidentally, seeking entries for the 2010 competition, which closes July 1, and hope to find as good a winning essay this year. In his survey of Michigan’s newspaper history, Frank Boles outlines a subject that deserves more research. In tracing the career of Rebecca Shelley, whose portrait is on the cover of this issue, Susan Goodier introduces us to a Michigan advocate for pacifism and women’s rights whose career was significant but just below the level of visibility in textbooks. Shelley’s fight to regain her American citizenship, which she lost by marriage to a foreign national, sheds light on the convoluted legal technicalities that have compromised American women’s rights as citizens. Urban planning can be quite convoluted too, but simple ideas often have the most popular appeal. Kalamazoo won national acclaim in 1959 and became a model for downtown renewal across the country by closing two downtown blocks to cars and turning the street into a pedestrian mall—only to reverse direction and reopen to automobiles in 1998. As Michael Cheyne’s account shows, cosmetic 162 Michigan Historical Review solutions to urban problems may inspire great enthusiasm but bring limited results. Besides publishing articles, the MHR seeks to review interesting and significant books that bear upon the history of Michigan and the Great Lakes region. Often publishers send us the books; sometimes we have to request copies. Undoubtedly, despite the best efforts of the book review editor, we overlook some books that we should have reviewed. But we try not to. In this regard the Review owes a major debt of gratitude to Mitchell Hall, who has served as book review editor from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2006 to 2010. Because Mitch has been elected chair of the Central Michigan University history department, a post that may tax even his energies, he will be succeeded this fall by Jennifer Green, who is a professor in Central Michigan University’s department of history. Our book reviewers deserve much more credit than they usually receive. Within the university world, publishing articles in scholarly journals is a major way (besides publishing books) by which historians build a reputation that may in turn help them find employment and earn promotion. Although usually unpaid, the work is professionally rewarding and, like any significant creative accomplishment, personally and intellectually satisfying. Writing a book review is a more modest and limited activity; most academic departments regard it as “professional service”—not quite like jury duty, to be sure, but as something akin to doing one’s duty as an academic good citizen. So there are no extrinsic rewards. And editors at journals such as ours necessarily limit quite severely the...