The purpose of The Activist History Review is to explore the connections between the past and current political, economic, social and cultural issues, provide a space for the study of history in overtly and deliberately political terms, encourage a more activist orientation among the academic professions, and shape public discourse regarding the past in the interest of positive change. Please craft your work accordingly.
Possible Content Submissions
Book Reviews (500-800 words) – Reviews of books (academic or otherwise), related to the past (broadly defined) with an emphasis on the implications for current issues.
Television and Movie Reviews (1250-2000 words) – A scholarly analysis of a television series or movie related to the author’s field of study that also engages contemporary issues. Good examples of this genre include Abby Holekamp’s review of The Americans and Andreas Meyris’ review of Man in the High Castle.
Features (1250-2000 words) – Features should be tied to a specific set of sources, like Jade Shepherd’s “Treating Mental Illness in Victorian Britain,” or a body of literature, like Ben Feldman’s “Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible!” Authors should make a clear claim about the relevance of their subject matter for activists and academics enmeshed in current social, cultural, and political struggles.
Other types of content submissions of varying lengths and formats will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Editing Standards
We encourage contributors to use clear language to convey their ideas while avoiding simplifications and generalizations. We enforce academic formatting and require that all posts include proper evidentiary citation throughout. Most authors adhere to Chicago Manual of Style, which favors endnotes. However, as The Activist History Review encourages submissions from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds, all academic citation styles are accepted as long as they are followed consistently and correctly throughout your work. We also encourage the use of hyperlinks, especially for contemporary content, which empower readers to interact with and verify your argument. As a general rule, contributors should hyperlink to freely-available online sources, such as news stories, Tweets, and websites, and provide endnotes for text-based sources, including monographs and archival materials.
Submissions should be saved as Microsoft Word documents and written in 12 point, Times New Roman font and single-spaced without tabulation. As unyielding text is often intimidating, we encourage journalistic paragraphing and the inclusion of relevant images. Any images you would like to accompany your work should be saved separately from your Word document and submitted as separate attachments in the same email. Please label images as “Image 1,” “Image 2,” etc., in the order they will appear. In the body of your work, please clearly mark the location at which you wish each image to appear and include the original source of the image for attribution along with any desired captioning. Lastly, The Activist History Review utilizes US American spelling and grammar conventions, em dashes, and the Oxford comma.
Sample Text:
This pattern of exploitation continued right up to the point of the colonies’ split from the British Empire. Indeed, a number of historians argue that racial fears of slave uprising and Indian attack that developed during the colonial period were primary causes of the rebellion, fears that were specifically named in the Declaration of Independence as motivating factors.[1] [Image 1 – “The allies – par nobile fratrum!/Indignatio feci. American political cartoon depicting joint act of cannibalism by King George III, Lord North, and native warriors, 1780.” – http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004673372/%5D In the postwar period, the same elite white men whose fear had inspired the rebellion began to redefine themselves and newly define their nation in the interest of both maintaining the political, economic, and social benefits they enjoyed under the British Empire and bringing together a group of less than united states.[2]
[1] Historians point in particular to the white colonial reaction to British ministerial actions like the Royal Proclamation Line of 1763, which limited colonial expansion to the Appalachian Mountains to maintain peace with indigenous communities, and Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775, which offered freedom to the slaves of any white rebel colonist that joined the British military. Many white colonists viewed these actions as part of a larger plot by the British ministry to limit their perceived “rights” by aligning with their longtime social enemies. See Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
2 For an overview of this process, see John M. Murrin, “Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1966). and T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Submission Instructions
If you would like to make a submission, email us at activisthistory@gmail.com with a (maximum) 250-word pitch and a short bio of no more than 100 words. If your idea is approved, subsequent communications will be conducted directly via a provided email.
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