The HAHR at Maryland

We regard our new role as editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review as a privilege, a challenge, and, above all, an opportunity to expand the boundaries of the journal's content, audience, and influence. To be sure, the journal's standing will continue to depend, first and foremost, on the quality and diversity of the articles submitted to it, and on the careful critiques by outside readers and book reviewers who volunteer their time to evaluate their colleagues' work. In this sense, we realize that editing this journal is a bit of a balancing act. Our predecessors at Yale introduced a series of changes and innovations in the HAHR—special issues, thematic debates, visual materials, and an interdisciplinary scope—that we regard as having transformed the journal for the better. We hope to continue on this trajectory of innovation while maintaining the HAHR's long-standing role as the "journal of record" in the field of Latin American history, with a commitment to publishing articles that range across the full spectrum of chronological, methodological, and geographical specializations in our field.

When the HAHR moved to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1997, Gil Joseph and Stuart Schwartz noted that the journal had thus traveled north of the Mason-Dixon Line for the first time in decades. The move to Maryland relocates the journal in a quintessential "border state," in a region that played a major role in the evolution of the Atlantic economy, and on a campus that is minutes away from the U.S. National Archives. During our tenure as editors, we would like to highlight certain themes and concerns that reflect our geographic location. In particular, we envision regular forums, debates, or featured articles within three broad themes of scholarly interest. One is rethinking the history of the Americas—essays that problematize the "North-South" hemispheric divide that has long characterized our field. Another and closely related theme is the history of the African diaspora, a growing field that, by its very definition, seeks to erase conventional boundaries of research and specialization. Third, we would like to include, as a periodic feature, brief articles on newly organized or recently uncovered archival or document collections that would be of use to researchers in our field. We particularly encourage submissions on these themes.

Information technologies are reshaping scholarship nearly as fast as they reshape the larger world. We will continue the precedent set by our predecessors at Yale, using electronic mail to facilitate the entire editorial process, from article submission and peer reviews to final copyediting. Further, we see in digital media exciting opportunities that go far beyond the mechanics of publishing. Most people are aware, for instance, that electronic editions of all past issues of the HAHR are available through JSTOR, and all current issues are available through Project Muse. We have discussed with Duke University Press the prospect of publishing, in print and digital formats, a wider range of visual images (maps, paintings, photographs, and so on) to accompany articles, and we intend to explore the possibilities of publishing sound recordings, video, and other unconventional "texts" alongside the printed word. This, we believe, will enable scholarship and the historical imagination to expand more effectively into new and neglected areas of language, representation, and historical experience.

We want to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Yale editorial team: editors Gilbert Joseph and Stuart Schwartz, associate editor Emilia Viotti da Costa, book review editor R. Douglas Cope, and managing editors Jonathan Amith and Anupama Mande. We thank them both for their excellent leadership and production of the journal and for making the transition to Maryland a rewarding learning experience. We also thank our colleagues at Duke University Press for their support, cooperation, and openness to innovation. We are pleased to announce our new team that includes, in addition to ourselves, Daryle Williams as associate editor, Erick Langer (of Georgetown University) as book review editor, and Kathryn Litherland as managing editor. We are...