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In This Issue, The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Page xi, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.xi
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Extract
As is the custom, the February issue opens with this year’s AHA Presidential Address, “White Freedom and the Lady of Liberty,” by Tyler Stovall (University of California, Santa Cruz), who served as AHA President in 2017. In what could hardly be a more timely set of remarks, Stovall argues that one of the most recognizable images of freedom in the modern world, the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, has a darker history than is usually acknowledged. Examining both the statue’s origins in France’s Third Republic and its subsequent history as a public monument in America, Stovall considers Lady Liberty’s role as a beacon of whiteness. Ultimately, he concludes, a reckoning with the statue’s role as a racial symbol directs our attention to the racialized nature of definitions of freedom in the modern world.
Regular readers of the journal will know that we often publish a collation of interlinked articles called an AHR Forum, accompanied by an introductory essay or closing comment (see December 2017’s “Follow the Money”). Quite often, the forum does not come to us prepackaged, as a single submission, but is “curated”—in today’s parlance—by the editors by combining separately submitted, but clearly related, articles. This may be serendipitous, but it also reflects our faith that in this era of increasingly “unbundled” academic publishing, the single-volume journal aiming to be more than the sum of its parts still has an important role to play in advancing scholarship and building intellectual community.
