Submission of Articles
Articles and pitches must be original, not submitted elsewhere, and should be submitted online. All submissions are subject to review by the Perspectives editorial board before acceptance and publication. All accepted articles will be published online; selected articles will also be published in print.
Any article accepted for publication will become the property of the American Historical Association and will be subject to the copyright policy of the AHA, which includes the AHA’s right to publish the article in print as well as any other medium. Articles published in print receive a $100 honorarium, excluding In Memoriam essays and letters to the editor.
Authors writing about teaching should consult the Submission Guidelines for Teaching Articles before submitting a pitch or draft.
Preparation of Articles
All articles for Perspectives on History should be written in a style that can engage a wide audience, and authors are encouraged to avoid academic jargon.
Authors are encouraged to specify which section of the magazine they believe their article best fits. Article types and word counts are:
Features
(1,600 words) treat some aspect of the study or practice of history in a way that is accessible, intellectual, and interesting to a broad audience. Authors will receive a $100 honorarium upon publication.
Viewpoints
(1,600 words) are pieces which front the author’s experience in the discussion of their subject matter. Authors will receive a $100 honorarium upon publication.
Perspectives on Culture
(1,750 words) provide historical approaches to and informed musings on pieces of popular media. Authors will receive a $100 honorarium upon publication.
Career Paths
(1,750 words) explore nonprofessorial careers and objectives for those with graduate degrees in history. Authors will receive a $100 honorarium upon publication.
Everything Has a History
(650 words) provides a deep descriptive dive into a single object (broadly construed) and its history. The article must be accompanied by a high-definition image. Authors will receive a $100 honorarium upon publication.
On Contract
(800 words) is written by a contingent or non-tenure-track historian working in a range of professions and focuses explicitly on issues influencing their professional lives. Authors will receive a $100 honorarium upon publication.
The Graduate
(800 words) discusses some aspect of the experience of being in a history graduate program.
In Memoriam
(700 words) are obituaries honoring historians. Long Overdue essays are a subset that honor historians of color whose passing the AHA did not mark.
Letters to the Editor
(500 words) are unsolicited responses from readers to Perspectives articles. All letters must adhere to the AHA’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct.
Copyediting for House Style
Perspectives uses the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. In general, the editors aim to make an author’s prose as effective as possible, both in the author’s interest and that of our publication.
Spelling, especially of proper names, and all factual information (dates, place names, statistical data, and so on) should be verified by the author(s) before submission. We encourage authors to supply a working title for their article, although the final determination of headlines, images, captions, pull quotes, and other forms of display type are made by the editors.
Since Perspectives runs on a tight schedule, the editors typically ask authors to respond to edits within 24 to 48 hours.
Illustrations
We encourage authors to suggest images or other graphics that can be used as illustrations with their articles. Images of people, places, and objects work far better than scanned images of documents or text. These images should be sent as high-resolution digital files with a resolution of at least 300 dpi. Digital files of color illustrations and photographs should preferably be rendered in CMYK.
Authors must include full citation and permission information for all illustrations they provide. In all cases, it is imperative that the author submitting the images has (or will have secured before publication) permission to reproduce the image, unless the image is clearly indicated to be in the public domain or is available via an open license such as Creative Commons.
Citation Style
Perspectives does not use footnotes or endnotes. Instead, authors should make use of hyperlinks and in-line citations. For charts or graphs requiring a citation in the caption, authors should include a note about the data source in the caption.
- John Tosh’s The Pursuit of History, for instance, gives the example of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The History of England (1848), which could be used as a foundational secondary source or a primary window into Victorian political and intellectual life.
- Lee’s account of the unmaking of the Jacobean achievement by Charles I appeared in The Road to Revolution: Scotland under Charles I, 1625–37 (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1985), which focused on Charles’s inability to manage the religious and political tensions his father had navigated so well.
- In Mother Is a Verb, for example, Sarah Knott writes as both a mother and a historian to explore mothering across time and place.
- Fig. 1: Degree completions in history (absolute number and as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees), 1997–2019.
Data source: IPEDS Completions Survey from the US Department of Education.