The Journal of Interdisciplinary History celebrates publishing substantive articles, research notes, review essays, and book reviews for half a century
This year, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JIH) celebrates fifty years of publication. One of the MIT Press’s inaugural journals, JIH has been publishing substantive articles, research notes, review essays, and book reviews that relate historical study to other disciplines such as economics and demography for half a century.
Recently, we sat down with Robert I. Rotberg (founding co-editor of the journal and founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Intrastate Conflict) and Ed Freedman (managing editor), to discuss the journal’s impact on the field of history and their approach to the fiftieth volume. Read the interview.
We planned an event to commemorate the anniversary this fall, but have had to postpone it until spring 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since we can’t gather to celebrate JIH yet, we are making 11 special semicentennial articles—published throughout the fiftieth volume—freely available until August 31, 2020:
- Climates of History, Histories of Climate: From History to Archaeoscience
- Words and Numbers: A New Approach to Writing Ancient History
- The Under-Appreciated Rodent: Harbingers of Plague From the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century
- Field Notes: Agricultural History’s New Plot
- Environmental History in the JIH, 1970–2020
- The Evolution of Models in Historical Demography
- The History of Quantification in History: The JIH as a Case Study
- The Interplay of Demographic, Economic, and Social History
- Quantifying Interdisciplinary History: The Record of (Nearly) Fifty Years
- Economic History and the Historians
- Art and History, 1969–2019
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History features substantive articles, research notes, review essays, and book reviews that combine the study of history, spanning all geographical areas and periods, with other scholarly disciplines. The JIH features articles that incorporate or engage:
- Archaeology/Material Culture
- Art
- Big Data
- Biography/Psycho-biography
- Biology
- Climate/Environment
- Economics
- Geoscience/GPS
- Opera/Theater
- Population/Demography
- Quantitative Methods
- Technology
- Urban Studies
The journal encourages contributions that demonstrate how methodological connections with other disciplines, and the methodologies of other disciplines, can throw light on the past.