Independent History Research Fellows Program: Peer Review

For an example of the peer-review process, check out the Journal of American History (March 1997) – it includes Referees' Reports for Joel Williamson's article, "Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, and the American Historian."

Activity from The Journal of American History

Vol. 83, No. 4, Mar., 1997

• “Front Matter.” The Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (1997): 1209–1568. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2952897.
• Williamson, Joel. “Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, and the American Historian.” The Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (1997): 1221–53. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2952899.
• Ayers, Edward L. “Referees’ Reports.” The Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (1997): 1254–67. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2952900.
• American Historical Association: Statement on Peer Review for Historical Research (2005)
• Responses to Round Table: “What We See and Can’t See in the Past: Responses.” The Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (1997): 748–65. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2952727
• Response from JAH about next steps for review:
  • "When an article elicits expert judgments as engaged and divided as in the Williamson case-whether the article's content is mono- graphic or autobiographical - I write a detailed letter to its author outlining problems in the draft that need to be satisfactorily addressed before we would publish the article. (In this letter I often underline particular points in the individual referees' reports, which are enclosed for the author.) I try to suggest ways the author can address these concerns. Indeed, the most exciting part of editing is to work with authors to try to bring forward strengths in their articles while adequately addressing reservations raised by expert referees. The revision is then sent back to original referees (and sometimes ad- ditional ones) for evaluation. In this case the record is particularly truncated because Williamson declined an invitation to indicate how he would have responded to the criticism of his article. Ordinarily, his revision would have determined whether the JAH would publish the article."

Peer Review Readings

Joel Williamson biography - A note that usually the author's identity is hidden from the referees. In this article, the author makes his identity clear by referring to himself frequently.

Term Historiography:

Rampolla Definition of Historiography: "historians frequently disagree about how to interpret the events they study. These differences in interpretation reflect the varying approaches that historians take to their subject. For example, individual historians might be interested primarily in social, cultural, political, economic, legal, or intellectual history. They might approach their work from a Marxist, Freudian, feminist, or postmodernist point of view. Such orientations and affiliations affect the ways in which historians explore and interpret the past; thus, historians interested in the same historical event might examine different sets of sources to answer the same question... A historiographic essay is one in which the writer, acting as a historian, studies the approaches to a topic that other historians have taken." 

Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, 10th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, Macmillan Learning, 2021), 3d-2.

"Historiography deals with the writing of history. In the broadest sense, it is the study of the history of history (as it is described by historians). Historiography has several facets, but for the purposes of a researcher trying to situate his work in the context of other historians' work on a particular topic, the most useful thing is the historiographic essay or review article that summarizes changing ideas about and approaches to the topic. A really good historiographic essay will also address why historians' ideas have changed."

- Steven Knowlton, Librarian for History and African American Studies, Princeton University Library.