Building upon a Century-Long Tradition of Excellence

Previous articleNext article FreeEditorialBuilding upon a Century-Long Tradition of ExcellencePero Gaglo DagboviePero Gaglo Dagbovie Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreI am honored to venture into my new role as editor of The Journal of African American History (JAAH). For at least two decades now (dating back to when I was an ambitious doctoral candidate), the life and work of the journal’s founder, Carter G. Woodson, has been a focal point and cornerstone of my research as well as an invaluable source of personal inspiration. It is a great privilege to have the opportunity to build upon a foundation that he and his coworkers established more than one hundred years ago. On September 9, 1915, Woodson cofounded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), in Chicago with William D. Hartgrove, George Cleveland Hall, James E. Stamps, and Alexander L. Jackson. According to its constitution, the foundational purpose of the ASNLH was straightforward: “the collection of sociological and historical documents and the promotion of studies bearing on the Negro.”Expanding upon this no-frills mission, in January 1916 Woodson launched The Journal of Negro History, the first major scholarly journal on the African American historical experience. The inaugural issue featured four articles, several primary source documents, a small collection of book reviews, and a “Notes” section announcing forthcoming publications. Beginning in 1917, Woodson published the proceedings for the ASNLH conferences as well the annual reports for the association in the journal, a practice that seems to have ended in the mid-1970s. The journal had an immediate impact during the era of Jim Crow segregation when mainstream white academic historical journals largely ignored scholarship on African American history and almost never published articles by black historians. Several years after its founding, Woodson’s journal had more than 1,500 subscribers (and a circulation twice as great), and, in response to demands, he began reprinting past volumes. During his lifetime, its popularity continued to grow. Woodson, who edited The Journal of Negro History from 1916 until his death in early April 1950 and contributed funds from his personal income to maintain the journal, is the journal’s longest-serving editor. During his editorship, the journal was ritualistically released as a quarterly in January, April, July, and October. He is most responsible for laying the foundations upon which we stand today. John Hope Franklin accurately dubbed Negro History Week Woodson’s most “characteristic creation.” Nonetheless, The Journal of Negro History, renamed The Journal of African American History with the first issue of 2002, certainly embodies the enduring legacy of “The Father of Black History.”To make a long story short, since its early and formative years, the journal, like the study of African American history and the black historical enterprise, has transformed by leaps and bounds. By publishing original scholarship exploring scores of topics in African American history and the histories of African and African-descended peoples, the journal has been indispensable to the black historical profession, the study of the vast African diaspora, and the diversity of US historiography in general. The journal has simultaneously shaped and been molded by the evolution of the field of African American history. The journal has served as a launching pad for more than a few scholars early in their careers and has provided a critical space for cutting-edge scholarship, refreshing scholarly debates and exchanges, and appraisals of countless publications in the field. For the past century, countless scholars from various generations, backgrounds, and subspecialties have supported and contributed to the journal in a range of manners.The journal has had the following editors: Carter G. Woodson (1916–50), Rayford W. Logan (1950–51), William M. Brewer (1952–70), W. Augustus Low (1970–74), Lorraine A. Williams (1974–76), Alton Hornsby Jr. (1976–2001), and, most recently, V. P. Franklin (2002–18). I appreciate the support of the ASALH leadership and am grateful to my predecessors and to all the past associate editors, editorial board members, editorial managers and assistants, and manuscript reviewers for their work in making JAAH what it is today. The most recent past editorial team deserves to be recognized: Associate Editors Derrick P. Alridge, Joyce Owens Anderson, and Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua; Editorial Assistants Edward D. Collins and Lee Facincani; and Editorial Board members Mary Frances Berry, Bettye Collier-Thomas, Robert L. Harris, Darlene Clark Hine, Gerald Horne, Robin D. G. Kelly, Genna Rae McNeil, Michael Omolewa, Nell Irvin Painter, Daryl M. Scott, Brenda E. Stevenson, James B. Stewart, P. Sterling Stuckey, Sheila S. Walker, Margaret Washington, and Lillian S. Williams.I have particularly benefited from the guidance of V. P. Franklin. As editor, he has been vital to the journal’s advancement and to its smooth transition to the University of Chicago Press (UCP). I am grateful to the UCP staff for working closely with me as the journal switched to an excellent online electronic management system. The Winter/Spring 2018 special issue (“National and International Perspectives on Movements for Reparations”) was the first volume of the journal published by UCP. The circulation of the journal continues to grow. More than seven hundred institutions currently subscribe to the journal, and, through the Chicago Emerging Nations Institutions, JAAH is available in more than eighty countries throughout the world.Building upon a tradition of stellar editorial boards, I am blessed to be working with a first-rate editorial team. The Associate Editors, longtime colleagues Derrick P. Alridge and Daina Ramey Berry, and the Assistant Editor and Book Review Editor, LaShawn D. Harris, have been especially supportive since I took on the pressing—and intimidating at times, I must confess—responsibilities of an incoming editor. Representing various academic ranks, institutional affiliations, and areas of expertise, the Editorial Board members possess superlative skills and a commitment to African American historical scholarship. They are Leslie Alexander, Shawn L. Alexander, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Davarian L. Baldwin, Mia Bay, Keisha N. Blain, Stephanie Y. Evans, Tiffany M. Gill, Thavolia Glymph, Cheryl D. Hicks, David H. Jackson Jr., Martha S. Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Kevin Mumford, Celia E. Naylor, Russell Rickford, Stephanie J. Shaw, Nikki M. Taylor, and Ula Y. Taylor. We met as a group for the first time in early October 2018 during the ASALH’s invigorating 103rd Annual Conference and Meeting in Indianapolis. The excitement and commitment of the Editorial Board members is essential to our vision, mission, goals, and future.Embracing the ASALH’s mission of promoting, preserving, interpreting, and disseminating “information about Black life, history, and culture to a global community,” JAAH remains the leading scholarly journal in the field of African American history. For the past century, the journal has published original and in many instances pathbreaking articles on nearly all aspects of the African American experience (not to mention the contributions to ways of knowing the seemingly boundless African diaspora). The new editorial team strives to continue this tradition of excellence. During my term as editor, the journal will aim to provide its diverse readership with original and innovative scholarship, seek to foster cross-generational dialogues and conversations, and keep abreast of trends in the discipline during what has been called “the era of the digital echo.”The contributions of V. P. Franklin as editor of JAAH have been documented and recounted in a recent special issue of the journal edited by Sundiata Cha-Jua, “The Scholarship and Social and Educational Activism of V. P. Franklin” (Summer 2017), and during the 103rd Annual Conference and Meeting of the ASALH in Indianapolis, there was a retirement reception honoring Dr. Franklin for his contributions to the journal from 2002 through 2018. So, instead of revisiting in detail how the journal has specifically evolved under his editorship, in what follows I briefly summarize and highlight some of the discernable trends and offer some modest thoughts about the potential future development and scope of the journal.During the past several decades, more than a few topics, themes, theoretical approaches, and subspecialties have gained popularity in the African American historical enterprise. Since the early twenty-first century, the journal has published approximately thirty special issues on a range of provocative subjects in African American life, history, and culture, such as education, urban life, black women, hip hop culture, slavery, the Black Power era, print culture, the African diaspora, civil rights leadership and organizations, dimensions of black citizenship, sports, the reparations movement, the slave trade, the West, business, migration, understudied African American religious orientations, and incarceration. The historical experiences of diverse groups of black women from various time periods have been showcased in several special issues. Building upon the long-established biographical tradition in African American historiography, there have been special issues on historical icons like Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Hope Franklin. The journal has also published symposia, book forums, special reports, interviews, primary source documents, commentaries and editorials, and in memoriams. The journal will continue to publish special issues on compelling topics, publish symposia and book forums on field-altering scholarship, and remember the contributions of those who are no longer with us.More than 250 articles have appeared in the more than sixty issues of the journal published since the dawning of the new millennium. Approximately 25 percent of these articles focus on themes in African American history from the era of the transatlantic slave trade through the era of Reconstruction; about 40 percent deal with the first half of the twentieth century (roughly 1900 through Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954); and 35 percent revolve around the conventional Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power era, and the post–Black Power era. While one could certainly categorize the articles that have appeared in the journal since 2002 in many different manners, the following eight sweeping and non–mutually exclusive categories reveal the breadth of subjects that have received significant attention: organizational histories (5 percent), slavery (7.5 percent), transnationalism or black internationalism (9 percent), black popular culture history (9 percent), assessments of specific incidents (11 percent), African American women’s history (14 percent), region-focused case studies (20.5 percent), and biographies that, in many cases, could be considered black intellectual history (24 percent).The journal invites article submissions in the wide-ranging field of African American history from its earliest phases. At the same time, there are certain areas that could receive further attention in the journal during the next three to five years, such as black internationalism, global black history or transnational African American history, post–Black Power era history (or recent or contemporary African American history), black radicalism, African American women’s history, the philosophy of black history, theoretical explorations, gender and sexuality studies, interdisciplinary historical topics, the contributions of lesser-known black activists and leaders, and African American intellectual history, just to spotlight a handful. Furthermore, as is the case with all areas of scholarly inquiry in the twenty-first century, the study, dissemination, and praxis of African American history have been affected profoundly by monumental advancements in digital technology, including new ways of sharing information and ideas (blogs, microblogs, tweets, etc.), virtual online communities, social media, and the digital humanities. Such phenomena deserve further exploration in African American historical writing.In the process of revisiting the wealth of research that has been featured in The Journal of African American History since the beginning of the twenty-first century, as well as in its earlier years, and reflecting upon the changes in the black historical enterprise during the past several decades, I am inspired by what has transpired and by the scholarship that has been generated. I look forward to helping build upon this tradition of excellence. Notes Pero Gaglo Dagbovie is University Distinguished Professor of History and associate dean in the Graduate School at Michigan State University. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 1Winter 2019 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/701768 © 2019 by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article

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