31: American Historical Review
Interview with editor Robert Alan Schneider, March 2009
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
The topic of this installment of Periodical Radio is American Historical Review, the prestigious quarterly publication of American Historical Association. Published since 1895, it includes scholarly articles and critical reviews of current publications in all fields of history. To discuss the journal and its role for historians, my guest is editor Robert Alan Schneider, Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University.
Steve: Dr. Schneider, welcome to Periodical Radio.
Dr. Scheider: Thank you.
Steve: American Historical Review is a distinguished journal that’s notable for its mission to publish and review scholarship from every major field of historical study. Why is it important in you field to have a history journal that does not specialize in one region, time period, or methodology?
Dr. Scheider: Well I guess the short answer is that historians cover the globe and cover all times and all places, and to one degree or another we have always tried to do that. Although our conception of the world over time, that is when you go back and see what historians have done, was once more limited, and now it’s quite broad. So it’s just being the journal of historians means that we really are obliged to do history in the broadest possible way to give credit to the kinds of history that is being done by the people we serve and by the people who are in the profession. But I think in a more important sense, really, and one which speaks to how history has developed as a profession, that sort of the natural tendency is for us to do our specific fields and to work our particular subject areas, which in some cases become narrower and narrower as people become more specialized and as the demands for research become greater and greater. So there’s on the one hand a pronounced trend for sort of Balkanization and separatism and specialization, and you see this reflected not only in positions in history, but also in journals that are increasingly specialized, especially now with the possibility for digital journals which can serve a very, very limited number of people and scholars, which is good. I mean, specialization and deeply researched work is very, very good. You can’t do the kinds of synthetic work unless you have the deeply researched specialized work. But the American Historical Review in a sense operates in a way that is to compensate, counterbalance that trend towards specialization and Balkanization. We try encourage the kind of work that while highly focused in many respects, still can speak to a broad range of historians, such that someone who does European history will have some reason to read an article on say Latin American history, or Asian history. In that sense, we are a kind of counterforce, an umbrella journal that tries to draw the interest and the attention of scholars that has often normally focused on their own field to a wider tableau of history.
Steve: It must be a daunting challenge for you and your board of editors to evaluate submissions from such a vast breadth of scholarship. How do you manage the task?
Dr. Schneider: Well, we have a board of editors composed of twelve historians whose specialties are quite varied, and we really try to cover as many of the kinds of history that we get. Obviously, there we don’t . . .for example we have a Latin American historian, and he happens to be a specialist of early modern Latin American history, so we don’t have on the board a historian who does modern Latin American history. In that sense we can’t have on the board representatives from all fields and all times of history, but we do have enough of a spread of specialties so we rely upon them. Also, we do for our review process rely upon outside experts. We might want to talk in this interview about the review process which I think will give people a sense of how we deal with the wide range of history that we receive. But you know in a sense my job as an editor is to be the stand-in for the historian in general. I’m an early modern European historian, so most of the history that lands on my desk is not in my field, obviously. But I read it not as a specialist. I read it as someone who comes at history with a general interest in history as well as a special interest in a particular field. I want to see how the different submissions speak to me as the generalist. So we rely up the specialist, but we also rely on the sensibility of the generalist, which is a stand-in for the ideal reader of the American Historical Review.
Steve: I do want to address peer review of the research articles, but I also wanted to ask a few questions first about the book reviews.
Dr. Schneider: Sure.
Steve: Book reviews are a very important component of American Historical Review and have been since its beginning in 1895. For our listeners who aren’t historians, can you explain why book reviews are so important to your discipline?
Dr. Schneider: Well, they’re absolutely fundamental. First of all, just the amount of scholarship produced in monographic form is so daunting, and ever increasing, such that any given scholar, even for his or her field, wouldn’t have a sense of what’s out there, what’s being published without a journal like ours and other journals that at one level announce the books, but also provide summaries and some sort of critique. On one level it’s a kind of inventory of scholarship that’s come out, that tries to evaluate it. But also, peer reviews of books are essential for in a way evaluating scholarship and evaluating it for tenure, for promotion, which is also done through letters and evaluations that are private, in letter form. But to have scholarship reviewed by journals is a way of authorizing or affirming that the scholarship is legitimate. I mean, monographs that are published are reviewed by the presses and the presses ask scholars to review the scholarship, but the review process continues, and it continues in a more public forum. The journal venues are one of the important ways in which scholarship is evaluated, either affirmed or criticized or otherwise judged. In a sense, without a book being reviewed, its existence is tenuous in a way. That is, the book is there, but not to be reviewed, especially not to be reviewed by the premier journal, which everyone at least has access to since it’s one of the most widely circulated and available journals, the book’s existence is sort of called into question, if you wish. That scholarship is not legitimized in the same way that other work is.
Steve: Many more books are published than there’s space to review in American Historical Review, correct?
Dr. Schneider: Yes. We receive about three thousand books in the building here in Bloomington where we have our offices. We only have space to review a thousand. I have to say that one of the most time consuming tasks we have is just vetting the books, deciding which books to review and which books we should not review. There are certain categories of books we do not review. For those, the process of vetting or deciding is rather simple. We don’t review textbooks. We don’t review republished books. We don’t normally review books that are biographies, unless they have some scholarly aspect which goes beyond the individual. We don’t review books that are pitched to the general public, which are really synthetic or popularized versions of history. But beyond those categories, there’s a whole range of books that are in kind of a grey zone. Is it scholarship, or is it not? There are no hard and fast rules. So for many of the books, we have to scrutinize them and make decisions which are problematic and I think open to question. One of the most frequent complaints we get from authors is “Why haven’t you reviewed my book? My book came out by X Press as the result of so many years of labor, it is scholarship, and yet you decided not to review it.” You know, often we take a look at the book again, and perhaps decide to review it, but often it’s a matter of just explaining, “Well, we thought that this wasn’t a scholarly contribution, and thus might be reviewed elsewhere.” We also don’t review documents, for example. So getting the 3000 down to 1000 is itself a very, very time consuming process which has a lot of fuzziness to it, I have to be honest about it.
Steve: But you feel comfortable with that fuzziness? I mean, you’re in a position where you have to make such judgment calls.
Dr. Schneider: Well you do.
Steve: Does it weigh heavily on you?
Dr. Schneider: Well, it does, especially when I get complaints. Sometimes they’re rather, you know, vehement. And I think this reflects the fact that not to have a book reviewed in the AHR really says something about it, or at least something about our view of it, so those are difficult decisions. But, you know, that’s part of what we have to do. In most cases I think we’re correct, and in the vast majority of cases people don’t quarrel with us. It’s very clear why we don’t if it’s a popular book, and this is no value judgment on the worth of those books at all. It’s just a matter of whether they’re appropriate to be reviewed in the AHR, which has a limited amount of space to do this. But if the book has no footnotes, if it’s synthetic, if an author writes something for a general audience, then he or she ought to expect that with that comes the likelihood that it won’t be reviewed by the AHR.
Steve: How are your book reviewers chosen, the folks who actually write the reviews?
Dr. Schneider: Well again, that’s a time consuming process. I have to say that while I’m responsible for the book reviews in the sense that I’m the editor, fortunately I’m not involved in it, because otherwise I would have no other time to do anything else. We have a book review editor, Moureen Coulter, and she has a staff of graduate students who have been selected from the Bloomington department, the I[ndiana] U[niversity] Department of History, who are specialists in various fields and have languages that allow them to look at books and see what they’re about in the various fields that we review. There are seven of those graduate students. So there are eight people responsible for the book review section, which is quite a bit. Again, we need those people in part because the process is so complicated and labor intensive. We choose the reviewers based upon a database that we have, that we’ve accumulated with 50,000 names or something, it’s really quite enormous. The people in the database are from all over the world who are specialists in various fields. One of the things we have to do, which again makes the process somewhat difficult, is we have to weed out all of those people who have had any role in the writing or production of the book. That is, all the people who are thanked in the acknowledgements, and I have to say, sometimes in smaller fields, this really eliminates virtually every potential reviewer. If I had a message to historians, I would say be careful in the number of people you cite in your acknowledgements, because they’re eliminated as possible reviewers. So we have to go through them and then check them against the database and see if . . .we normally don’t have people review a book for us more than once in a calendar year. So if you reviewed a book for the February issue, you wouldn’t be able to review a book for the October issue. We get a certain number of people who have been chronically late, and we don’t ask them. So often, we have to really search high and low to get people to review books. But again, that’s part of what we do, and we spend a lot of time, and we try to be very careful in getting the right kinds of people to review these books, who have the kind of expertise. Especially in smaller fields and subspecialties, an insider, especially an expert or a scholar in that field him or herself might quibble, but we do the best we can. I think the results are rather good. I think the reviews are serious and to the point, and fair.
Steve: Each issue of American Historical Review includes “Communications,” which seem to usually be disputes between a book’s author and its reviewer. I would suspect that authors usually disagree with negative reviews, and that such dialogues sometimes descend into petty spats.
Dr. Schneider: Um, hmm.
Steve: How do you determine which communications are worth publishing?
Dr. Schneider: Well, you know we do get a certain number of letters, not a whole lot. I’m actually surprised. I’ve been in this position, this is my fourth year. I’m surprised that not every issue even do we get responses to reviews. I think in part, reviewers are in general pretty gentle. It’s rare to have a really, really critical review of a book. I don’t know what this reflects. It might reflect a certain kind of self-censorship among reviewers. It might reflect the fact that a lot of work is at the very least solid, and I think that’s part of it. The standards of our profession are rather high. The outcome is that there’s a kind of evenness and gentleness about reviews, I think fairly so. In fact, I think reviewers could be more critical, but you really can’t push that, it’s up to the reviewers themselves. So we get a small number of responses to reviews. We almost always publish them, as long as they deal with the content of the book, and they’re substantive. I have just recently turned down a letter, I had an exchange with the scholar in question--it was really quite sharp. He really wanted us to point out that the person who reviewed his book had something against him because this guy had written something critical about him in a previous essay, and that’s really all he wanted to say, that this explains why he was critical of the book, because he had some sort of payback that he was indulging in. I said this is just not enough. This doesn’t tell us anything about the issue, this tells us about something that you think is at play, but there’s no way we can prove it. Just because someone had been critical of somebody else’s work doesn’t mean that this is the reason why he’s critical of the book. After all, there are reasons to be critical beyond the personal, and you just can’t make that assumption. That’s the kind of thing that would have performed no service to our readers. It would not have drawn out any issues, wouldn’t have thrown more light on what’s at stake. I think that’s really what’s important, that we not degenerate or devolve into petty tit for tat, but rather keep our eye on what’s important here.
Steve: Let’s turn now to the research articles that are published and the peer review of them. What are the similarities and differences between the peer review processes for research articles and reviews of books? The books are open, so the reviewer knows who the author is, and the author will know who the reviewer is. For the research articles, is it a double-blind process?
Dr. Schneider: Yes. We have actually three stages of reviews, so maybe I should just summarize our review process.
Steve: Sure, go ahead.
Dr. Schneider: It’s more rigorous and somewhat complex. Everything that comes in the building here that we receive, almost electronically these days, is read in house, if only to see whether it’s appropriate. At that point, a lot of submissions are just rejected right off the bat. They’re either too long, or really too short, or they’re too narrow, or they’re clearly of a quality which does not warrant further consideration, and we just return them with a note pointing out how they do not fit our remit and the kind of standards we have. We do always write something, however, to the authors. If an article is somehow promising, if it fits all the criteria and seems to be the kind of material that we would be interested in, we will write an in house critique or review of it. Then in many cases, although not all in fact, probably only thirty or forty percent, we send it on to two members of the board of editors. At this point the articles are not masked, because it’s important that the board members not only evaluate the manuscript, but also tell us what sort of outside readers would be appropriate to evaluate this, and that they should know the author in case there are some entanglements or problems with potential readers because of previous controversies, either of historiographical or intellectual nature, perhaps sometimes even of personal nature, where there are departmental problems or whatever. That is to say, we have found that it’s helpful that at this point the board of editors know the author’s identity. Then normally that second stage of the review process is played out, and then we get the reviews back from the board members, and then we decide what to do. In most instances the article is sent back to the author with either a revise and resubmit or the article is rejected. The third stage, if at that point we receive it back again, or if it’s a really good piece and can be moved on, we then send it to three outside experts. The board members as well as us in house, we’re very, very keen on getting the right kinds of people, which is why we need the advice of board members and others in finding the right specialists and the right range of people to read it. We find three people who are experts in the field to review the manuscript. At that point it is masked. The reviewers will not know the identity of the author, and the author will not know the identities of the reviewers. So what that means is that a full review process will generate six reviews--one in house, two board members, and three outside experts. That’s where we really then have a full evaluation upon which we make a decision about what to do with the manuscript.
Steve: It’s an honor to have a research article published in a journal as prestigious as American Historical Review, so naturally authors are disappointed when their manuscripts are not accepted. Approximately what percentage of submissions are accepted?
Dr. Schneider: We’ve been running at about nine percent. That sounds like impossible odds. I’m obliged to be honest about that, and in some ways it’s not something I want to hide. It speaks to how difficult it is, and thus as you say, how important it is, and what an honor it is to be published in the AHR. It’s like bragging about getting into a college that only accepts ten percent of its applicants. But you have to take into account that we get a lot of submissions that are just inappropriate. I mean, I’m convinced that many of the people who submit articles have never even looked at the AHR. We do get some undergraduate essays that are very short or synthetic, or submissions from amateur historians who are writing about some great, great, great grandfather who fought in the Civil War, which are perfectly interesting and charming, but not for us. So the nine percent has to be taken with an understanding of the vast range of material we get. The fact is the bar is rather high. I have to tell authors often when I reject a manuscript that this doesn’t mean--and I do write letters that explain the grounds for not accepting the piece--it doesn’t mean the work is not good or solid or correct. It’s not a reflection upon the legitimacy or worth of the scholarship, and we often say it should be published, but not in the AHR, but rather in a more specialized journal. The fact is that in order to be published in the AHR, the work must not only be excellent, but also have a kind of reach, or be open to the interest of our wide readership. I mean, that’s what distinguishes us from virtually any other journal. We do try the best we can, and I will admit that we are less accessible at some times than others, but we try to make our articles open to the wide readership of American Historical Association and others who come to us with the idea that we will provide scholarship that addresses a wider range of concerns that more specialized journals don’t, and shouldn’t, quite frankly.
Steve: In early February 2009 a rejection actually made the pages of the New York Times, and you were quoted regarding why the article was rejected. Could you sketch for us briefly what happened, and what lessons should be drawn from that experience?
Dr. Schneider: Yes. I did write about this the History News Network, and I think it’s still available (“The ‘Nixon Tapes,’ an Author, and the American Historical Review,” Feb. 9, 2009, http://hnn.us/articles/61694.html). I really wanted that to stand for my view of things, but I’ll be happy to talk about it. This was a matter of a submission by Peter Klingman. I mention his name because he went public with this information. Normally I wouldn’t discuss a rejected manuscript, and certainly wouldn’t disclose the name of the author, but in this case he went public with it in a big way. He submitted this piece that was about the Nixon Tapes, and really was largely a kind of corrective piece that had a definite ad hominem aspect to it. He and others have objected with the way Stanley Kutler, who was the person who first edited and published the tapes in book form, Klingman and people who think like him believe that Kutler at the very least was sloppy in transcribing the tapes, and in fact go beyond that and believe that he deliberately misrepresented and incorrectly transcribed the tapes in order to push a particular perspective on Nixon and John Dean and the like. Anyway, his article was really was of that sort. It was really very much aimed at Stanley Kutler and it made a lot of accusations having to do with his work, you know, using terms like “falsification” and “deliberate inaccuracies” and “sloppiness” and the like. We read it and could not and did not at that point make any determination on whether Klingman was correct or really on whether this was worthwhile. It just seemed very, very narrow. It was a corrective of a certain body of evidence that obviously has a certain importance in American history, but that didn’t seem worthy of the American Historical Review. It didn’t have an analysis, it wasn’t conceptually interesting, and it was, as I say, not just the tone but the language was ad hominem and did not belong in a scholarly publication. It was not scholarship in that respect. So I wrote a letter of rejection, but even before that he had gone to the New York Times and/or people close to him had gone to the New York Times and got this submission publicized. This is before I even saw the manuscript, before it even got to my desk. This really bothered me. Forgive me for going on and on about this, but this is where I think the larger and more interesting point lay. That is to say, here a journalist for the Times is sort of convinced he used the fact that an article was submitted as somehow elevating the piece, that is Klingman’s piece, whereas I pointed out in a letter to the editor that wasn’t published in the Times that anyone can submit an article to the AHR. We receive 300 a year. It means absolutely nothing, the fact that it’s submitted. In fact, someone pointed out that a piece is not an article until it’s accepted. It’s just at this point a piece of writing that someone has submitted, and it’s not scholarship. I mean, scholarship is only scholarship once it’s been vetted, and of course this wasn’t vetted, and we made our own judgment on it that it was inappropriate. But we made no pronouncement in terms of the accuracy or legitimacy of the scholarship. Anyway, this then became news, right? Klingman, once he got the letter of rejection from us, went very public with it, and had my actual letter posted on the History News Network, clearly disclosed the letter to the New York Times, and thus that became the basis for another article, the headline of which was something like “American Historical Review Rejects” this article, as if this was somehow big news. At that, I felt I had to intervene, and I wrote the piece for the History News Network [linked above]. I also talked to Clark Hoyt, who’s the public editor of the New York Times. He subsequently wrote a piece on the whole affair (“They Still Have the Nixon Tapes to Kick Around,” February 22, 2009), and cited me just in passing, saying that I didn’t think was very serious scholarship. My interest now is not so much on this particular affair, which I don’t think warrants the kind of attention it has attracted. My interest is how the realms of scholarship and news intersect, or interact. That to me is still of some interest, the idea that, you know, when do journalists pick up on scholarship and how much should they pay attention to the vetting process, by which scholarship is legitimized, at least by other scholars.
Steve: Dr. Schneider, I would love to continue this conversation. We didn’t get to all my questions, but unfortunately our time is up. You’ve been a very, very interesting guest, thank you very much.
Dr. Schneider: Well, it’s my pleasure.
Steve: American Historical Review is a benefit of membership in the American Historical Association, online at http://www.historians.org/. They offer a range of memberships ranging from $38 to $200 a year. Thank you for listening to Periodical Radio. I’m your host, Steve Black.