While David L. Ransel, editor of the Review, is a 1989–90 fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., the editorship of the Review has been left in the capable hands of Review Associate Editor, Ellen Dwyer, and Ann G. Carmichael, former Review associate editor. They have been officially designated acting editors in Professor Ransel's absence.

AHA members will note that, in addition to Louis Harlan's presidential address, the February 1990 issue of the Review offers a thought-provoking range of essays on race and class in the American South.

The following essays suggest the continuing intellectual excitement of topics first tackled by C. Vann Woodward, John Hope Franklin, and Louis Harlan, among others: Kenneth S. Greenberg offers a fresh look at the antebellum culture of honor; Loren Schweninger describes the lives and fortunes of a little-studied group—prosperous blacks in the South from 1790 to 1880; and Jane Landers reminds us of the complexity of the Spanish South in her essay on a free black town in colonial Florida. The implications of these issues for non-Americanists are then explored by Steven Hahn, who compares the situation of postemancipation Southern planters to that of Prussian Junkers and Brazilian sugar planters, and by Charles van Onselen in his analysis of social relations in the South-Western Transvaal of South Africa from 1900 to 1950.

This past October, the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA awarded its Hubert B. Herring Memorial Award for Best Article to James A. Sandos. His award-winning article, "Junipero Serra's Canonization and the Historical Record," appeared in the December 1988 issue of the Review, pages 1253–1269.

Dr. Sandos is an associate professor of history at the University of the Redlands, California. The article grew out of his studies of Spanish conversion activities in Alta California from an ethnohistorical perspective. He is currently working on an evaluation of Serra's life as mythohistory from Spanish, Indian, and American viewpoints. An early version of the article was presented by Professor Sandos on October 17, 1989, as an invited paper at the Third Conference on the California Indians, held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.