The January issue of Perspectives on History is now available online, and copies will be arriving in members’ mailboxes soon. AHA President Jan Goldstein starts her term with “In Praise of the Variegated Life,” a reflection on the powerful pressures toward sameness and a rallying cry for “All things counter, original, spare, strange,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have it.

Executive Director James Grossman devotes his monthly column to the variegated activities of the AHA, a useful recap of all (or most) that has gone on in the last year. And Lee White, executive director of the National Coalition for History, details recent recommendations to solve the declassification crisis, and notes that “What should be clear is that the federal government is crying out to the historical community for help….” This is a moment in which historians’ advocacy can be at its most effective—see White’s column for more on how to get involved.

Also in our Advocacy section, learn about why the AHA has called for the release of more Watergate documents, and if you didn’t see the notices on AHA Today, learn about a recent statement issued by the AHA Research Division on transparency in recruiting reviewers for journal articles.

In the News section this month: the 2013 jobs report finds a drop in job ads placed with the AHA, and launches an experiment with an expanded data set. Seth Denbo, the AHA’s director of scholarly communication and digital initiatives, details recent moves by institutions toward open access, and Vanessa Varin visits the Smithsonian Digitization Program, reporting on how 3-D scanning and printing might radically change the museum experience.

Readers will also enjoy access to essays on big data and the flu, architectural history and spatial imagination, taking a history PhD into the private sector, and a look back at The Education of Historians for the Twenty-First Century, 10 years later. We will be featuring more about these articles and others soon.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.