The Journal of Contemporary History and its Editors

It is 50 years since the Journal of Contemporary History made its first appearance. First published in January 1966, it was the brainchild of two exiled German-Jewish historians, Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse, who collaborated on it as editors for more than 30 years after its foundation. The journal was their creation, and for a long time it reflected above all their interests and preoccupations; they stamped their very individual personalities on it from the outset, and it still reflects their influence today. ‘In retrospect’, Walter Laqueur remarked many years later, ‘it has been probably one of the most lasting contributions by emigré historians.’ ¹ Through the last half-century, it has undergone many changes, and experienced many vicissitudes, but it has remained true to the vision of its founders as a pioneering academic periodical that presents new research and explores new fields while remaining accessible to the non-specialist lay reader.

The two founding editors were already established historians when they started their long collaboration. George Lachmann Mosse, born in Berlin in 1918, was a member of a large and prosperous Jewish family, best known in the Weimar Republic for its ownership of the liberal quality newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt. He studied at the famous Salem boarding school, one of many educational institutions founded in Germany and, later, Britain, by Kurt Hahn, which also included Gordonstoun, much favoured by the British royal family. With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Mosse family, whose media empire was a particular target of the Nazis, was forced to flee Germany. George’s father, who had remarried, sent him to a Quaker boarding school in York, where he struggled for a time but eventually gained admission to Cambridge University before the family moved, in 1939, to the United States of America. After completing his undergraduate studies at Haverford College, he moved to Harvard, where he obtained a doctorate in 1946 with a dissertation on Early Modern English religious history. This remained his main academic preoccupation for some years, but when he moved in 1955 to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his focus shifted to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The first major product of this new interest was The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, published in 1965, a wide-ranging empirical study of often very obscure right-wing and antisemitic ideologies in Imperial and Weimar Germany. As time went on, his books on Nazism and nationalism became more individual. The Nationalization of the Masses (1975) was one of the classic texts on the rise of fascism as a political religion. It was followed by others exploring, among other topics, the relationship of gender and fascism, and the cult of the memory of military heroes. Mosse was a charismatic teacher who inspired generations of PhD students, not least because he was a true original, pioneering cultural approaches to the study of fascism, nationalism and war at a time when most historians were still dealing with these topics with the traditional methods of political history and the history of ideas. The journal was thus, among other things, the product of the shift in his interests from the Early Modern to the Modern period that took place in the early 1960s, and especially his interest in fascism and its cultural origins, an interest he retained to the end of his life. ²

His co-editor and contemporary, Walter Laqueur, was born in the German city of Breslau (now the Polish city of Wrocław), in Silesia, in 1921. In 1938 he left for Palestine; his parents stayed behind, and were murdered by the Nazis. He studied for a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before moving to a kibbutz to work as an agricultural labourer. In 1944 he returned to Jerusalem and began to earn a living as a journalist. He entered the academic world first with brief spells at the University of Chicago (1956) and at Harvard (1957) then as Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University (1968–72) and the University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, from 1976 to 1988, where he was also Director of the Center for International and Strategic Studies, but he was never as closely bound to academia as was George Mosse; he remained with one foot there, the other in the world of journalism and policy studies. ³ As he later wrote:

Being an autodidact I suffered from feelings of inferiority. I knew after all little about the methodology of history and my knowledge of the philosophy of history was rudimentary in those years. There were other substantial lacunae in my education – and I had read much that was unnecessary. But there were also feelings of superiority, which I had to restrain not always successfully. Much of the time I had lived among simple, ordinary people, not intellectuals. I had experienced a world which was usually a closed book to most academics. ⁴

After publishing several works on Middle Eastern politics – a subject with which he never ceased to engage – he turned to Russian and German history with books including Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (1965) and Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (1962). Later on, he produced the first major narrative of postwar history, Europe Since Hitler (1972), and a substantial historiographical survey, Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (1976), and he pioneered the serious study of terrorism in a number of other publications.

A crucial factor in the founding of the journal was Walter Laqueur’s appointment in 1965 as Director of the Wiener Library in London in 1965. This was established by Dr. Alfred Wiener (1885–1964), a senior official of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, who began early on to collect documentation on the policy and ideology of German National Socialism. In 1933 he moved to Amsterdam, and six years later to London, where his by now very extensive collection of books, newspaper clippings and other materials formed the basis for the Jewish Central Information Office, which assisted after the end of the war in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. After his death in 1964 the library was renamed in his honour, and a newly founded Institute of Contemporary History was established in the same premises, in Devonshire Street, in Fitzrovia, London. Walter Laqueur was appointed Director of both institutions. The Institute of Contemporary History never really had a separate existence from the Wiener Library, and indeed part of the function of its name was to indicate to the broader public what the Library’s major concerns actually were, something that would not otherwise be easy to guess. Walter Laqueur clearly felt that it would be a good idea to associate both the Library and the Institute with a periodical covering the major areas of their interest, asked George Mosse to be its co-editor, and the Journal of Contemporary History was born. Laqueur later noted that Mosse:

went to many conferences and knew everyone in the field – which I did not. He was as well known in Italy and France as in the United States. In brief, his contribution to the journal was absolutely essential despite the fact that he made his home in Madison, Wisconsin, whereas the journal was published in London – a problem infinitely greater at the time than in our computer days. ⁵

The two men persuaded George Weidenfeld, an Austrian-Jewish exile who had built up a successful publishing house in London after the war, to handle the commercial and production aspects of the journal. Weidenfeld did not normally publish journals, so he made it a condition that the journal would only produce special themed issues which could be published, effectively, as books and translated into several languages. A contract was signed with Harper Torchbooks, the paperback division of Harper and Row, in the United States of America, for the production of each issue of the journal as a book for sale in the US market. The journal was initially owned by the Wiener Library and based in its premises, but the editors secured a commitment that the ownership would pass to them when the Directorship changed, which it duly did. The journal’s publication and administration costs until the end of the decade were materially assisted in 1967 by an anonymous donation of £3000 arranged through Sir Isaiah Berlin, the eminent Oxford historian of ideas. ⁶

The editorial work was taken on by Jane Degras, who had recently retired from the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, in London, where she had edited many volumes of diplomatic documents and a widely used collection on the Communist International. ‘I was hopeless as a copy editor’, Walter later confessed, ‘and George no better’, and the typing and secretarial work was done by her sister, who lived just north of London, in Letchworth. ⁷ A knowledgeable and experienced historian in her own right, Jane Degras was not one to mince words when it came to dealing with articles she considered deficient in one respect or another. One article she described as ‘very repetitious and badly written. We shall use it, but by the time I’ve finished editing it, I think it will be a good deal shorter.’ ⁸ The editors often asked her to take the final decision on whether an article should be accepted or not. ⁹ The part she played in the early days of the journal was crucial.

The first issue, on fascism, came out, amid a fanfare of publicity in the national and international press, ¹⁰ on 1 January 1966. It opened with an ‘Editorial Note’, written by Walter Laqueur, justifying the study of contemporary history as an academic discipline. The editors had read the manifestoes of the great Victorian journals such as the English Historical Review, the Historische Zeitschrift and the Revue Historique, and echoed their belief that a forum was needed in which scholars could be updated on the most recent historical arguments and discoveries. While these periodicals, however, aimed to cover all fields of historical research, a Journal of Contemporary History required additional justification. For long, the editors noted, historians had expressed strong reservations about the area the journal was to cover:

The main arguments against the writing of contemporary history were, broadly speaking, that the source material was usually not available to provide the necessary information about events and trends in the very recent past. Moreover, it was argued that, even if the facts were accessible and could be verified, the detachment required to deal with yesterday's events in an objective and balanced way would be lacking. Human passions, predilections, and prejudices would be too closely involved when dealing with events that happened in our own time and had a direct impact on our lives. ¹¹

Laqueur and Mosse dealt with the first objection by claiming, somewhat optimistically, that even though there was generally a 40-year embargo on access to official documents in most countries (since then, the rule has been widely amended to cover only the last 30 years), it was in practice impossible to keep secrets for more than two or three years in modern democracies. In fact, of course, experience in a whole variety of fields has shown that this is too sanguine a view. Even with the resources of the Internet at our disposal, serious academic history can rarely be written without access to archival materials, and articles that are merely journalistic, based on easily available printed and online source material, are unlikely to bring any significant new knowledge to light. Nor have abstract or quantitative analyses based on political science theories and methods found their way into the Journal of Contemporary History. On occasion, a broad synoptic analysis can bring new ideas forward, but the professional study of history, and especially recent and contemporary history, involves, overwhelmingly, research into previously unknown and undiscovered documents, so that the vast majority of articles published in the Journal of Contemporary History deal with events and processes that occurred more than thirty years ago.

Could the history of our own times be written objectively? Laqueur and Mosse mentioned, but evaded, this crucial issue. The idea of absolute objectivity, involving the complete self-effacement of the historian, was, they said, no longer very widely accepted, but exactly how they were going to ensure that their contributors did not show outrageous bias or parti-pris they did not say. Instead, they took refuge in the reassuring belief that even if it could not be wholly objective, contemporary history would be written with more immediacy and a greater understanding of the quality of life than was possible for more remote periods, which, in any case, were only of interest to specialists. Thus they welcomed controversies and exchanges of opinion about recent events, in contrast to the Victorian historical journals, which had not been prepared to entertain them. They explicitly addressed the Journal of Contemporary History to ‘the general reader’, offering a counterweight to the growing trend towards academic specialization and the fragmentation of historical knowledge. ‘It is our belief’, they declared, ‘that the gulf between the professional and the general student of history is not unbridgeable, and that where difficulties in communication exist, an effort should be made to overcome them.’ Both Laqueur and Mosse and subsequent editors have remained true to this principle; poorly written, over-specialized or jargon-ridden articles have never been acceptable and never found their way into the Journal’s pages.

The founding editors also evaded the question of the precise delimitation of the period they regarded as constituting ‘contemporary history’. What they were clear about, however, was the fact that ‘the field of study and discussion of the Journal will be Europe in the twentieth century'. Of course, Europe could be studied in its global framework, but contemporary Europe was a legitimate subject of study and debate, requiring no special defence or explanation. After centuries of Eurocentrism the pendulum had swung to the other extreme, and current fashions had led to a neglect of contemporary Europe. There had been a void, they declared, ‘which the present Journal will try to fill.’ Finally, they reiterated their keenness to avoid obscure or over-specialized articles: ‘Since resources are limited and the central problems of contemporary European history are still inadequately studied, the Journal will concentrate on the main issues of that continent in our time.’ ¹²

These views were underlined, amplified and to some extent modified in the following article in the opening issue of the journal, ‘The Study of Contemporary History’, by Sir Llewellyn Woodward (1890–1971), former Professor of Modern History at Oxford and an indefatigable editor of diplomatic documents. Woodward’s magnum opus, the five-volume official history British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (London 1970–6) marked him out as a strong believer in the importance of the history of international relations, though he also published a volume in the Oxford History of England, The Age of Reform, 1815–1870 (Oxford 1963). In his article for the journal, Woodward pointed out that although contemporary history was not new – it had, after all, been practised by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War – it had dropped out of the universities in the nineteenth century, before returning with a vengeance after the First World War, when there was a widespread belief among the British political and diplomatic elite that had they known more about the recent history of Central Europe and the Balkans before 1914, they might have made more strenuous and, above all, more informed efforts to avert the catastrophe of war. Like the editors, Woodward evaded the question of how contemporary history should actually be defined, but unlike them, he assumed in general that it was the history of international relations, as evidenced by the creation of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1920 by veterans of the Paris Peace Conference. When Woodward complained that contemporary history suffered from an excess of documentation, it was to diplomatic documents that he referred, and mostly published ones at that, not to source material that underpinned other kinds of history. ¹³

Yet the 11 articles that made up the rest of the inaugural issue were already pushing out the boundaries of conventional historical research by tackling the novel topic of the comparative history of fascism, which was then, as Stanley Payne’s article in the present issue of this journal points out, only just beginning to be studied seriously and to establish itself as a respectable subject for scholarly treatment. Fascism was to be a major preoccupation of the journal in the following years, but the opening issue also established another central and enduring aspect of its editorial practice, namely its regular publication of special issues on specific, usually comparative topics. The second issue also conformed to this pattern, with articles focused on the European Left in the twentieth century, ranging from Surrealism in France to radical writers in Hungary; so too did the third issue, which focused on the First World War and its origins, characteristically including articles on Romania and Hungary as well as Germany and Russia. There was a particular focus here on the debate raging at the time over the German role in the outbreak of war in 1914, with contributions from Klaus Epstein, Imanuel Geiss and Wolfgang Mommsen, establishing the journal as a significant forum for discussion on this topic, well before Fritz Fischer’s Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London 1968), the book at the centre of the controversy, had been translated into English.

As Laqueur later remembered, ‘we had no problem enlisting leading historians to contribute important and well-written articles to our journal'. ¹⁴ Mosse used his contacts to identify likely contributors, and his personal papers are full of copies of literally hundreds of letters he fired off soliciting articles (‘I see you have been working hard trying to get articles for us’, Walter Laqueur wrote admiringly to him in December 1970). ¹⁵ The special issues required by Weidenfeld duly appeared, on historiography, on literature and history, on education, on religion, on the Middle East, on the end of the First World War, on colonialism, on the Great Depression, on youth movements, on the Popular Front, on war, on nationalism, and so on. These were innovative topics, and many of the articles were pioneering examples of the new history being written in the late 1960s and early 1970s – including social history, but also the history of decolonization, a very contemporary issue in the late 1960s – the history of youth (a preoccupation of Walter Laqueur) and the history of ideology (an interest of George Mosse). Feminist and women’s history arrived with Temma Kaplan’s article on Spanish anarchism and women’s liberation, despite some misgivings from Mosse (‘This is basically a very interesting piece’, he wrote to her. ‘But it seems to suffer from the injection of recent concepts of women’s liberation into a quite different historical situation’). ¹⁶ The article almost immediately became a classic not only in the history of the Spanish Civil War but more generally in the emerging field of women’s history.

This was all a far cry from the traditional political and diplomatic history dominant in Europe and the United States of America at the time, above all in research and writing about modern Europe. Thanks to these groundbreaking special issues, the Journal of Contemporary History rapidly established itself as a new, exciting and original presence, going far beyond the ‘central problems’ and ‘main issues’ of twentieth-century European history outlined as the journal’s main focus in the Editorial to the opening issue. An Editorial Board with such distinguished historians as Karl Dietrich Bracher, Francis L. Carsten, Norman Cohn, Gordon A. Craig, Saul Friedländer, Harry Hinsley, James Joll, Annie Kriegel, Bernard Lewis, William Norton Medlicott, René Rémond, Hugh Seton-Watson, David Thomson, Eugen Weber and Stuart Woolf, met once a year to decide on special issues and other subjects, and although these conferences do not seem to have continued after 1967, the Editorial Board continued to be used by the editors as a resource for the peer review of articles when they felt they lacked the expertise to reach a judgement themselves. ¹⁷

By the beginning of 1970 the journal had established itself as a successful venture. Its circulation stood at 2300 per issue, and in addition Weidenfeld sold up to 600 individual copies of each issue. Harper Torchbooks sold between 4000 and 11,000 copies of each issue, published as separate books. There had been six Italian editions and three German ones. ¹⁸ But the initial practice of publishing special issues in German and Italian as well as in English had to be abandoned in view of the fact that most historians in these countries could now read English and so did not need translations. The arrangement with Weidenfeld was proving difficult to sustain in this respect, and the strain on the editors of having to produce book-style special issues was also mounting: as early as December 1966, Laqueur remarked that ‘we could go on as at present; on the other hand, a straight journal (i.e., no “special” numbers) also has distinct advantages’. ¹⁹ Weidenfeld and Nicolson, a commercial rather than an academic publisher, had little or no interest in publishing academic periodicals and had made an exception for the Journal of Contemporary History in view of the good personal relations between George Weidenfeld and the editors, at the same time, in effect, insisting that it was not really an academic periodical in the normal sense of the word, but, in effect, a book series. The grant provided through the good offices of Sir Isaiah Berlin was coming to an end, and Laqueur warned Mosse in January 1970 that ‘there is no certainty that Weidenfeld will renew our contract at the end of this year’. ²⁰ It was time to consider other publishers. ²¹

The editors approached Cambridge University Press, in the belief that a link to a university would give the journal a more stable financial basis and perhaps take over the payment of Jane Degras’ salary from the Wiener Library and cover other expenses such as the rental for the office there. ²² But the Press said it had reached the limit of the number of journals it was prepared to publish. In addition, Weidenfeld paid £350 per issue in royalties, to be divided between the authors, and another publisher was unlikely to continue this practice. ²³ But the writing was on the wall for the arrangement with Weidenfeld. Over an agreeable lunch in July 1970, Laqueur secured George Weidenfeld’s consent to an amicable divorce. ²⁴ After exploring the possibility of publishing with Macmillan, and then dropping it because they would not produce the journal in the United States of America, ²⁵ Laqueur opened negotiations with a small and recently founded US publisher, the Greenwood Press, in Westport, Connecticut; Weidenfeld had not published the journal in the US market, as Mosse noted, and the arrangement with Harper Torchbooks had come to an end because of declining sales. ²⁶ After some negotiation, a contract was signed with Greenwood and an announcement of the transfer of publisher was duly issued. ²⁷ But as Mosse wrote in September 1970, ‘Greenwood’s financial state is always precarious.’ ²⁸ Problems began to arise over issues such as the production of offprints, the transfer and sale of back issues, book contracts, and distribution arrangements. The executive who had negotiated the deal was ousted in a boardroom coup, and his successor claimed that Laqueur and Mosse had broken the contract, demanding payment of $5000 in compensation. Laqueur consulted his lawyers, telling them angrily that he had to ‘get out of the clutches of these gangsters as quickly as possible’. ²⁹ The Greenwood Press gave way and the issue was eventually settled; the Press subsequently recovered and went on to establish itself as a leading publisher of scholarly and reference books. ³⁰

The journal had to look for another publisher quickly. The editors found an eminently suitable one in SAGE Publications. Founded in the same year as the journal, 1965, in New York, by Sara Miller McCune and George McCune (the name was drawn from the first two letters of the names Sara and George), SAGE focused on social science periodicals but also produced a small number of history journals such as European Studies Review (now European History Quarterly), founded in 1970, and had opened an office in London in 1971. As Mosse later wrote, ‘Walter Laqueur and myself own the Journal, but we have, as it were, contracted out the running of the journal itself, apart from the editorial work, to Sage Publications in London.’ ³¹ The new arrangement brought the Journal of Contemporary History into the hands of a fast-expanding and professional journal publisher and proved an outstanding success. The long-drawn-out negotiations with Greenwood had resulted in a lengthy delay in the publication of the first issue of volume 7, and it appeared in two consolidated issues, issues 1–2 and 3–4, in January–April and July–October 1992, respectively.

To mark the transfer of publisher, the typeface, layout and design of the journal were changed. ³² Laqueur and Mosse coupled this transfer to a new publisher with the foundation of a book series, SAGE Studies in Twentieth-Century History, which they edited. SAGE’s Katy Brooks wrote to the editors in 1978 expressing the publisher’s gratification at ‘the continuing – and in some cases, following major American reviews, the increase in – sales for the Studies series books’. ³³ But the additional burden of editing a book series alongside the journal was too difficult to sustain, given the globetrotting lifestyle of the two editors, and after producing work by Francis Carsten, Robert Gellately, and a few others (including myself), the series came to an end. ³⁴ A parallel series of collected papers, SAGE Readers in Twentieth-Century History, which gathered together, in book form, themed articles from the journal, did not last very long either; duplicating special issues in this way was in the end rather redundant. ³⁵ Although the editors occasionally considered looking for another publisher, such as Longmans or the University of Wisconsin Press, the arrangement with SAGE worked well, and has continued successfully up to the present day. ³⁶

As the editors remarked in their introduction to a somewhat belated tenth anniversary issue (published in October 1976 instead of October 1975), ‘the immediate focus has been upon those topics which seemed of greatest interest to historians or those which were undergoing the fastest revaluation'. They announced proudly that ‘the Journal has been among the first to bring the new social science history, as it was practised in America, to the attention of European historians'. Yet, they conceded, it was undeniable ‘that the overwhelming majority of historians who are engaged in revaluating contemporary history proceeded according to the traditional canons of historical analysis’. ³⁷ And indeed, the character of the journal changed in the early 1970s with the growing number of non-thematic issues containing unsolicited articles, now that the journal’s reputation was established enough for younger, and often more senior scholars too, to send in their work for publication. ‘We used to be tied to special issues’, Mosse wrote in 1970, ‘but we no longer are to such a great extent.’ ³⁸ The overwhelming majority of these articles were on more or less standard political history topics; Kaplan’s was a rare exception during these years. As the journal entered maturity in the 1970s, it started to look a good deal more conventional than it had done at the outset, despite all the efforts of the editors, who consistently rejected articles they regarded as ‘old-fashioned and dreary diplomatic history … without any imagination whatsoever'. ³⁹ On the other hand, they were suspicious of the new, and, as it turned out, short-lived fashion for ‘psychohistory’, with one article described by Mosse as ‘a dreadful piece of work’ (he added that at least the writings of Rudolf Binion, the leading psychohistorian of the day, were interesting). ⁴⁰ In general, they did not accept articles that were, as George Mosse put it in one letter to his co-editor, ‘without any kind of analysis at all’, or ‘almost entirely descriptive’. ⁴¹

Unsolicited articles were now being sent in to the editors in sufficient quantity to create a growing backlog and force them to limit their length to 7000 words in order to squeeze more into each issue. ⁴² At the same time, special issues continued to be published, now put together and introduced by guest editors. The April 1976 issue contained a lengthy set of articles on the history of the European Left, edited by Tony Judt, who at the time was working on the Left in France. The editors returned in the October 1976 issue to produce a second collection on fascism, then for the April 1978 issue, the German labour historian Gerhard A. Ritter edited a pioneering collection of comparative essays on working-class culture. The October 1978 issue, introduced by the US sociologist Robert Nisbet, presented articles on conservatism, followed by five more articles in the October 1979 issue. In January 1980 the journal, under the guest editorship of the Russianist Hugh Seton-Watson, tackled the effects of decolonization on imperial states and societies, including Austria-Hungary, Britain, France and Spain. Typically, the following issue presented three more articles on this topic: often, it seemed, contributors were too late to secure a place in a special issue, or there was not enough room for them.

In their tenth anniversary editorial, Laqueur and Mosse conceded that its heavy concentration on the interwar years had drawn some adverse comment. In the January and July 1981 issues of the journal, they attempted to answer the critics by publishing two special issues on the Second World War. This indeed seemed to prompt a shift forward in time from this point onwards, although the contributions to the first issue of 1982, a special issue on decadence, edited by the historian of fascism and analyst of the nineteenth-century French peasantry, Eugen Weber, focused mainly on the period before 1914. With this, and the following issue, on sexuality, the journal returned once more to new issues and approaches in contemporary history. As George Mosse noted in his introduction: ‘Over the years the JCH has attempted to reflect the extension of historical research into fields of study which hardly existed when the Journal was founded sixteen years ago.’ The history of sexuality was one of them, but it was not being presented merely as another sub-specialism within the discipline: ‘Like every issue of the Journal, this is meant to present new lines of historical investigation and at the same time advance our knowledge about the general course of history.’ ⁴³ In practice, however, truly innovative issues of this kind continued to appear only when one of the editors intervened, or a guest editor presented new work in a particular field – July 1983 and January 1984 saw, for example, two special issues on film in history and the history of film, while a special issue edited in October 1985 by George Mosse focused on physicians in modern history. Two issues, in April and October 1987, presented work on the emerging subject of intelligence history; April 1988 returned to the history of the Left; the April 1989 issue focused on military history. Not every reader was happy with the journal’s renewed focus on novel areas of research: one cancelled his subscription because he considered there were too few articles on political and diplomatic history, and too many on topics such as ‘sexuality in history (whatever that means)’. ⁴⁴ But non-themed issues were still overwhelmingly focused on conventional political or diplomatic history, though from this point the journal began to print increasing numbers of contributions on the postwar period (three out of seven in the April 1983 issue, for example, and all of the articles in the July 1986 issue).

By this time, Jane Degras had retired as Assistant Editor and the post had been taken over by Sharon Baruch, who left in June 1979 to start a family, then in 1979 by Aileen Kent, who had worked at the Wiener Library from 1968 until 1971, when she also started a family, proof-reading for the Library’s Bulletin and also for the journal. ⁴⁵ The Library’s Deputy Director Bernard Krikler asked her to return in 1979, and she remained in post until 2005, being paid by the Wiener Library up to May 1992 and then by royalties from the journal after that. ⁴⁶ She did all the copy-editing work and correspondence, and, as she later remembered,

dealt directly with the authors, most of whom were hugely appreciative, but some – very few – were a pain in the neck! One in particular stands out. When he returned his proofs, he had written all over them ‘PLEASE SPLIT INFINITIVES’ – all of which I had studiously reconnected! Needless to say I paid no attention to his hysterical plea … Walter and George were both a joy to work with. I was completely in awe of Walter's brain and memory; he would cast his eye once over an article and months later remember exactly what it said. When they were both out the country – which was most of the time – I was in constant contact with them. It all worked very smoothly. ⁴⁷

The journal continued to be edited from a small room on the top floor of the Wiener Library, in Devonshire Street, cluttered with manuscripts, files, and books sent in by publishers in the vain hope that they would be reviewed.

In 1979 the journal changed its cover design again. A crisis in the Wiener Library’s funding in the mid-1970s prompted Laqueur to propose its relocation to Tel Aviv, a move that resulted in widespread protests from British historians of Nazi Germany. A proposal from Laqueur to move the journal with it was torpedoed by Mosse, who pointed out that its location in London was essential if it was to remain a mainstream publication directed primarily at an English-language readership. ⁴⁸ After most of the Library’s stock of books was indeed taken (after being microfilmed for the use of readers in London) to Tel Aviv, where they form a separate section in the University Library, the idea of a wholesale move was dropped in 1980, and the Library, with its extensive collection of original documents, remained in London. In any case, as Mosse wrote to Julius Kirschner, editor of the Journal of Modern History in Chicago, ‘the Journal was never really a part of it, and is now on its own in London'. ⁴⁹

In their twentieth anniversary retrospective, published in April 1986, Mosse and Laqueur restated the principles on which they had based the journal since its foundation, but noted that it had developed in unexpected ways as well. ‘The emphasis on Europe’, they confessed, ‘has not been quite as heavy as we originally thought.’ They proclaimed proudly that no other journal had focused so closely on the history of fascism, and reiterated their commitment to new ideas and approaches, which were the subject of the articles in the issue, devoted to the historiography of various countries and subjects since the mid-1960s. Yet their verdict on the writing of contemporary history at this point was surprisingly pessimistic. It was, they confessed, becoming more difficult to find high-quality articles in the field. Confirmation can be found in the decline in the page extent of the journal around this time, from a standard 800 pages per volume in the 1960s and 1970s to 631 pages in 1986, 709 pages in 1987, 680 in 1988 and 703 pages in 1989. By this time, Walter Laqueur was worrying about the end of contemporary history altogether, as the fall of Communism led some to believe that democracy had won and there would be no more historical developments of significance in the future. ⁵⁰ The journal, he concluded, would have to sit it out and wait and see. Meanwhile, the growing volume of contributions on the postwar period was a reassuring sign that there were still topics of importance to write about. ⁵¹

For more than a quarter of a century the editing of the journal had gone smoothly, despite growing logistical difficulties. Both editors were restless and constantly on the move, taking on new jobs in Israel and the USA at one time or another. But this did not impinge on the business of running the journal. As Stanley Payne later recalled:

The editing of the JCH was for long a two-man job, with George and Walter rarely in the same geographic location but keeping in touch through frequent long-distance phone conversations in German. They moved in opposite directions geographically. Around 1970 George took a half-time position (January to June) at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and soon after Walter left his part-time post in Tel Aviv to become director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown in Washington. My impression was that George played the greater role in setting up Special Issues, because he almost always attended the American Historical Association convention (primarily as a social occasion), after which he went off to Israel. Some of the Special Issues were initially negotiated at the conventions. Despite being near the center of things in Washington, Walter was never as gregarious. ⁵²

The editors held a weekly telephone conversation, in German, in which they discussed specific articles as well as general issues; they met each other in person occasionally, but far less frequently; but the Mosse archives reveal a frequent and intensive correspondence, in English, with letters often dictated by the two editors to their secretaries. The editorial partnership worked well. As George Mosse’s partner John Tortorice later recalled:

Generally, they were in agreement, and it seemed to me that George with his extensive connections in the scholarly community generated the majority of the submissions, and had already read and commented on the articles which would have been sent by mail to Walter, but I am not sure about this. In their phone conversations, Walter often questioned George about the various articles, and about books George had read over the course of the week, and it seemed his way of absorbing a vast array of scholarly research in a condensed form. George often would ask Walter for political news from Washington, London, Jerusalem, etc. George always employed a personal secretary, and this was of immense help in conducting journal business – he also was in continual contact with Aileen Kent [the journal’s Assistant Editor]. By the time I knew them, they had formed a comfortable, efficient, effective relationship, and this allowed for a very enriching collaboration in editing JCH. ⁵³

This arrangement continued until the week before George Mosse’s death. As Walter Laqueur later remembered, ‘we did not, of course, always see eye to eye, but our work together over more than thirty years could not have been more harmonious'. ⁵⁴

Of course, there were some problems. Occasionally the two editors let an article slip through that in retrospect they felt should not have been published. ‘We should really try to co-ordinate better', wrote Mosse to his co-editor in January 1976, adding: ‘It is a miracle, anyhow, that it happens so little.’ ⁵⁵ On another occasion, Laqueur wrote to Mosse:

I see from your letters that you accepted – or commissioned [–] some articles in German. You say ‘we will do the translation', but we have neither translators not money. The last time we – or rather I – was foolish enough to have an article translated it cost us £400. We simply cannot do this again. ⁵⁶

There were also more deep-rooted problems. The editors increasingly felt that the quality of contributions was declining as academic specialization grew and social science modes of research and presentation became more common. As Walter Laqueur noted, they:

faced, over the years, a palpable decline in style; writing well became almost suspect. This decline was particularly obvious in articles that reached us from the United States. There was the most unfortunate emphasis on providing footnotes for every statement, however obvious and uncontroversial. Contributors had to be convinced that readability was an important consideration and that there was a difference between a dissertation in which the author had to enumerate everything he had ever read and an article for a journal of this kind. ⁵⁷

Their initial insistence on clarity of style, readability and an ability to reach an audience beyond academia was becoming harder to sustain. With the expansion of the historical profession, however, and the emergence of many new journals focused on very specialized areas of history, keeping faith with these original principles was more important than ever in a journal which covered every area of history since the beginning of the twentieth century, and was likely to be read by many historians who were not specialists in the areas covered by individual contributions.

By the early 1990s, there were signs that the era of the founding editors was nearing its end. Both Mosse and Laqueur were now in their mid-seventies and beginning to think about the succession. The matter became urgent when Walter Laqueur had to be admitted to hospital for a hip replacement, an operation requiring in those days a prolonged convalescence. As Seymour Drescher, George Mosse’s former doctoral student and subsequently a leading historian of modern America, later remembered:

Sometime in 1992, probably at the American Historical Association annual meeting, George Mosse told me that he'd like me to become a co-editor of the Journal. I had been one of the first of George's students to get a PhD under his supervision at Wisconsin in 1960. I frankly demurred. My own primary interest lay in the 18th and 19th centuries. I lacked the whole network that one ought to possess as a prerequisite to such a position. George insisted that I'd only be coming aboard as insurance, since Walter was having health problems. My second step was to have an interview with Walter in a London hospital. Walter reiterated that there would be no difficulty. I'd be charged with reading submissions for quality of writing, etc. … My one brief intervention was to ask whether the Journal might be expanded to include a book review section. Walter did not seem to be interested. Most of the rest of the interview was spent discussing his upcoming procedure and British public and private medicine. Given that I was only a PhD (or what my father called a ‘schmekeldoctor') this was even more of a one way portion of the conversation. ⁵⁸

In fact, Mosse at least had originally intended that Drescher should ‘take over many more duties. That should mean that articles should from now on be sent to him first’. But he left it up to Aileen Kent to send articles to himself if they fell within his area of expertise, and since the bulk of them did, most continued to go to him rather than to Drescher, whose expertise lay in the field of nineteenth-century US history. ⁵⁹ In fact, it was clear that nothing about the journal was going to change while Laqueur and Mosse were still at the helm. The idea of including book reviews was rejected because Walter Laqueur found them too negative when they were written by academics (only generals and diplomats, he thought, could be trusted to be fair). ⁶⁰ Seymour Drescher came onto the editorial team in October 1992, and did read some articles from time to time, ⁶¹ but as he realized, his main function was as a kind of fail-safe should Walter Laqueur be unable to continue with the work of editing the journal. In fact Laqueur did indeed recover quite quickly from the operation, and returned to his editorial activities, though Drescher continued to be listed as co-editor on the masthead.

After some time, it became clear that Drescher’s specialism in the nineteenth century meant that he would not be able to take on the work the editors had intended he should. In particular, he was not commissioning articles, unsurprisingly since he had few contacts in the world of contemporary history. ⁶² The editors asked Aileen Kent to approach Arthur Marwick, whose work concentrated exclusively on the twentieth century, in April 1994, and ask him to join the editorial team. ⁶³ Marwick readily accepted. Founding professor of history at Britain’s Open University since 1969, Marwick had solved the problems of devising a broad introductory course in history for distance-learning, part-time, adult students brilliantly, and with the course being taken through a mixture of correspondence, television broadcasts and study weekends, he was a familiar name to hundreds of thousands of students by the mid-1990s. Familiar with modern communication technologies, he often sent his views to Laqueur and Mosse by fax rather than letter. His main work was on the impact of total war on society, which he regarded on balance as positive, accelerating social change and bringing about improvements such as the emancipation of women, as he argued in his first book, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (1965). He could hardly have been more different from the founding editors of the journal. A cantankerous and opinionated Scot, he spent much of his life rebelling against his austere Quaker upbringing. As the historian A.W. Purdue later wrote:

The parental household provided a caring but an intellectually austere and earnest environment. Reflecting this and rebelling against it, Arthur became from his undergraduate days at Edinburgh University, a sort of puritan cavalier; immersed in work which he took very seriously, until, his stint in library or archive over, he would sally forth in search of drink and women. ⁶⁴

‘Forever a 1960s man’, Purdue added, Marwick was ‘an heroic drinker’, ‘arrogant’ and ‘fearless in delivering his views’. Marwick’s colleague at the Open University Clive Emsley noted that he was ‘combative’ and ‘sometimes intemperate’. ⁶⁵ Younger than Mosse and Laqueur by almost two decades, he had little knowledge or understanding of the Central European Jewish background from which they came. His intellectual and professional life was rooted in the world of British history and British universities.

In contrast to Drescher, Marwick, even before he joined the editorial team in 1995, had, as Laqueur remarked, ‘been exceedingly active and got several excellent papers’. ⁶⁶ In particular, he had introduced a major controversy into the pages of the journal. In their opening manifesto in 1965, Laqueur and Mosse had declared that the journal would not be ‘actively looking for controversy’, but Marwick threw caution to the winds as he printed the text of his Inaugural Lecture at the Open University, delivered, somewhat oddly, almost a quarter of a century after he took up the Chair of History there. In ‘Two Approaches to Historical Study: The Metaphysical (Including ‘Postmodernism’) and the Historical’ ⁶⁷ he polemicized at length against postmodernist and poststructuralist conceptions of historical writing, reasserting in the strongest terms a traditionally empiricist concept of history as grounded solidly in historical research and historical facts. A lengthy controversy duly followed, though much of it generated more heat than light, and, like Marwick’s original essay, it was notably lacking in conceptual and theoretical sophistication. ⁶⁸

Formally taking up his duties as co-editor in 1995, Marwick was determined to make his mark on the journal, the more so since he was in the middle of writing his monumental history of The Sixties (Oxford 1998) and so felt that his vision of contemporary history was more contemporary than that of the journal’s founding editors. Seymour Drescher later recalled of a discussion with Laqueur in 1994, when it had already become clear that the journal needed a specialist in twentieth-century history:

I was assured that Arthur Marwick would also be coming aboard and would do more of the heavy lifting as a genuine contemporary historian … In contrast with Walter's Olympian gaze, Arthur was brimming with ideas of regeneration, although they came so thick and fast that I can't recall any of them. What I did conclude was that if Walter recovered quickly they would not be editing the same journal for too long. ⁶⁹

Marwick proposed a wholesale reorientation of the journal, which bore fruit in the first issue of 1997. The issue was published in a larger format than the existing one, with a new design – the green, black and white one in which it still appears – and with the notes for the first time at the bottom of the page rather than at the end of each article. In a personal editorial Marwick announced that ‘contemporary history’ was now commonly understood as ‘history since the second world war’, so the journal would shift its focus principally on to this period. He defended historical specialization as a necessary development, and declared that the journal itself would now become more specialized with its new, narrower focus on the most recent half-century. ⁷⁰ As if to prove that this could be done, every article but one in this issue dealt exclusively with the period since 1945.

Marwick’s pugnacious Editorial had already been watered down before its publication. As George Mosse had written to him on first seeing a draft, in July 1996, ‘my concern is that we still keep on with the field in which we have originally made our reputations and not frighten away anyone who wants to send us articles on the first half of this century’. ⁷¹ He inserted many amendments to this effect, for example watering down Marwick’s original declaration that the journal would only publish research on the postwar decades to: ‘This journal will continue to print articles concerned with earlier decades in the twentieth century, but from now on there will be an increase in articles relating to the period since the second world war.’ ⁷² Many other amendments were inserted along these lines. Mosse’s concern was that ‘we do not abandon what we were good at’. ⁷³ In addition, Mosse was also worried that Marwick’s advocacy of ‘specialist scholarly study … might give the impression as if we were not interested in the lay reader … . You can imagine that there are many interested laymen who subscribe to or read the Journal.’ ⁷⁴

As Seymour Drescher had foretold, Marwick’s period of office as co-editor did not last for long. He seems to have single-handedly put together the first issue in the new style, but the hand of Walter Laqueur was clearly visible in the second, published in April 1997, in which only three out of eight articles were on the postwar period, one of the three being an obituary of the Italian historian Renzo de Felice. Only three out of eight articles in the July 1997 issue were on the postwar years, while of the eight articles in the October 1997 issue, four were on post-1945, three on pre-1945, and one was conceptual. The next issue, for January 1998, split 50/50. Clearly the Marwickian attempt at a coup d’etat had failed. His much-heralded new post-1945 delimitation of contemporary history never materialized except in the issue in which he announced it. Marwick was predictably dismayed at the journal’s reversion to its traditional mould. As Aileen Kent remembered:

he had an enormous ego and basically didn't like anyone disagreeing with him … The desire to publish more post-1945 articles … was all very well but we were dependent on unsolicited articles, over whose subjects we had no control! If we had rejected all articles that dealt with the pre-1945 period, we'd have had hardly any! The reason why there were so few post-1945 articles in subsequent issues was simply that we didn't have any more in the ‘accepted' boxes. ⁷⁵

Indeed, there was something of a crisis by January 1998, with Mosse complaining of a shortage of articles, no doubt a consequence of the deterrent effect Marwick’s editorial was having on historians who worked on the period before 1945. ⁷⁶ Unless Marwick forced the rejection of pre-1945 articles and personally commissioned scores of post-1945 pieces, his plan was not going to work.

Seymour Drescher’s prediction was proved correct. Early in 1998, Marwick announced his resignation with effect from 2001, the date of his retirement from his Chair at the Open University. ‘Let me hasten to add’, he wrote, ‘that everything is going extremely well and I shall be very happy to play my part up until this point of retirement … The Journal goes from strength to strength.’ ⁷⁷ George Mosse was ‘not very happy to hear that you want to give up your association with the Journal, even if it is not until 2001.’ ⁷⁸ But neither side in the exchange of letters was being entirely open; in fact, there was no reason why Marwick should retire from his editorship at the same time as he retired from his chair, and what lay behind his decision must surely have been his dissatisfaction with the refusal of his co-editors to focus exclusively, or even predominantly, on the history of the postwar years. Shortly after receiving George Mosse’s letter, he changed his mind and decided to resign with immediate effect, and in the next issue, for April 1998, his name was no longer on the masthead. What remained as his legacy was the larger format, the green, black and white design, and most importantly, the placing of the footnotes at the bottom of the page, the subject to which he had devoted a large part of his personal editorial in January 1997. Articles on the post-1945 years, many of them commissioned by Marwick and reflecting his own specialism in British history, continued to appear in the succeeding issues, but gradually the journal reverted to its previous form, even including contributions on the years before the First World War. ⁷⁹

Following this débâcle, the two founding editors made a renewed bid to secure the journal’s future after they were gone. Both the additional editors were replaced, though for opposite reasons. Arthur Marwick had been far too active and interventionist, to the discomfiture of George Mosse and Walter Laqueur. By contrast, Seymour Drescher had been almost totally inactive, since as a nineteenth-century historian he was seldom asked to referee manuscripts and in any case correctly understood that his task was more or less to leave the running of the journal to the founding editors. In 1998, six years after his appointment, Drescher recalled later, ‘at George's eightieth birthday celebration, Walter gently asked me whether I wouldn't mind stepping aside. I was relieved in both senses of the term'. Mosse and Laqueur embarked on the search for a replacement – a search that had now become as urgent as it had seemed to be at the moment of the appointment of Marwick and Drescher. Not only were both founding editors now approaching the age of eighty, there was also another cause for making haste: George Mosse was seriously ill.

Mosse’s colleague at Wisconsin, Stanley Payne, a distinguished historian of the Spanish Civil War and a leading theorist of fascism more generally, recalled that the founding editors had first asked him to join them in 1988, but he had been busy with other projects and turned them down. A decade later, he recalled, George Mosse:

extended the invitation to me on the eve of a brief trip to Germany in November 1998 to collect another honorary doctorate. I promised a response on his return. Ten days after he got back we learned that he suffered from advanced and incurable liver cancer. Fortunately it was relatively painless and he was spared going through a series of futile, very unpleasant treatments. We were virtually neighbors and I last talked with George two or three days before he died. Our conversation was mainly about the Journal, concerning which he gave me various data and phone numbers. I told him to be of good cheer since he could be well satisfied with a long, productive and very significant life, to which he replied ‘Well, as you see, I am of good cheer.’ He was very calm and at peace with himself and the world, and very soon after died quietly in his sleep. He was always a cheerful man, even during difficult times, and once I even accused him of suffering from ‘irrational cheerfulness.' ⁸⁰

Payne readily agreed, and joined the editorial team from the April 1999 issue onwards. Although his work extended into the postwar period, its major focus on the history of fascism signalled a return to the original focus of the journal, which Marwick had tried, but failed, to reorient. Now in his sixties, with a string of major works to his credit, Stanley Payne also maintained the journal’s connection with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where George Mosse, who died on 22 January 1999, established an endowment to fund the George L. Mosse Program in History at Madison and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as LGBT studies in Wisconsin and the University of Amsterdam (he was one of the first, perhaps even the very first, openly gay professors at a US university). He was independently wealthy, especially after the restitution of his family property in East Germany after 1989, though as Walter Laqueur observed, material things meant little to him (‘He owned two suits, and there were occasions when he phoned me that he could not go out because both needed repair’). ⁸¹ For a time, the Foundation supported the Mosse and Laqueur Prizes, for the best articles of the year in the journal, but the money for this eventually ran out, and in any case the prize for the best article by a previously unpublished author found very few qualified entries, a tribute to the fact, perhaps, that the journal tended to attract articles by established scholars rather than new ones.

They also wanted an editor at the British end of the operation, preferably a Germanist. At Stanley Payne’s suggestion, I was invited to the Wiener Library in the summer of 1998 to discuss with Mosse and Laqueur the possibility of joining the editorial team. My own revised PhD had been read by both of them and accepted for publication in the short-lived SAGE Studies in Twentieth-Century History book series, and I had contributed an article to the journal in 1982. The sections of my book Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600–1987 (Oxford 1996) had been awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History by the Wiener Library and I had subsequently joined the prize’s panel of judges, which also functioned as the Academic Advisory Board of the Wiener Library. I also had some experience as founder-editor of German History (a position I had long since given up). I was honoured by the offer to join two such distinguished figures in the editing of such a major periodical in my field, and as the focus of my own work was at precisely that moment turning towards the Nazi period, I thought I would learn a lot from reading and exercising my judgment on the articles submitted to the journal.

After they had explained how the editorial process worked, Walter and George asked me if I had any suggestions to make. Would it not be a good idea, I asked, if the journal set up a regular system of peer review for articles submitted? After all, British universities now required articles to be published in peer-reviewed journals if they were to count towards the national research assessment exercise that formed the basis for the allocation of government funds for research infrastructure. The two editors looked at each other in puzzlement, before Walter turned to me: ‘I don’t think that’s necessary’, he said. ‘I trust George, George trusts me, and in time you too will learn to trust us.’ How about book reviews? The response was the same. The journal was quite happy with just review articles; it had never had individual reviews. As Mosse wrote to Aileen Kent in July 1998: ‘It seems to me that the idea of having more than one review as a compulsory feature of the Journal is not one I would think necessary.’ ⁸² As the interview continued, with the replies all in the same vein, it gradually dawned on me that I was not really being asked to do any work for the journal, nor would any changes I suggested be very welcome. My role, I realized, was to act (in cricketing parlance) as a long-stop, to be there should anything happen to either, or still worse, both of the founding editors, who after all were by now in their late seventies. And indeed, Walter Laqueur, who was now effectively editing the journal on his own, did not trouble to supply me with advance copies of any of the articles sent in to them, unless he felt they touched on a particular field in which I possessed some expertise.

I joined the editorial team at the same time as Stanley Payne, in April 1999, when the editorial team of ‘Walter Laqueur, Stanley Payne and Richard J. Evans’ was first featured on the masthead. The contents of each issue ranged across the entirety of the twentieth century, with the main focus, as previously, on the interwar years, but a growing number of articles on the Second World War, and there was a renewal of the special issue tradition, which had rather gone into a decline in the 1990s, with a collection of essays on shell-shock in the First World War, and another special issue on sport and politics. A new feature was the regular publication of review articles, which crept in unheralded in the July 1999 issue. Towards the end of his life, George Mosse had read and admired the writings of the young British historian Joanna Bourke in the cultural history of war – he is listed in the Acknowledgements to her book Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London 1996). He invited her to Madison to give a lecture, and afterwards told her he wanted to ‘shake things up’ at the journal. Would she, he asked, be willing to serve as Review Editor? ⁸³ He assured her that she would have complete freedom of action from the editors, though her role was solely to commission review articles, since the two editors were still resistant to the idea of including individual reviews. Over the next few years, Joanna Bourke brought a lengthy series of these pieces into the journal, often compensating by their surveys of new fields of history for the relatively conventional articles which still seemed to be favoured by the majority of the historians who sent them in; George Mosse would have approved.

By the time the review articles started to appear, Walter Laqueur was nearing the age of eighty, and thinking about retirement from the journal. On consulting his contract with the publishers, he discovered that he had the right to name his successor. He chose Niall Ferguson, a young historian who had made a name for himself with a huge history of the Rothschild banking firm, and then a provocative book The Pity of War, on the First World War, published in 1998. A meeting was organized at the Wiener Library in December 2003, with Walter Laqueur, John Tortorice of the George L. Mosse Program, Stanley Payne, myself and representatives of the publishers, to mark the handover. In his valedictory Editorial, published in the October 2004 issue, Walter Laqueur noted with some bemusement that ‘in the year when the Journal was conceived one of the new editors was not born and another had not yet entered university’. Time had moved on; more sources had now become available for more recent periods, and the Internet had made communication far easier than before. Ferguson replaced him as co-editor with Stanley Payne and myself in January 2005. The new editorial team echoed his conviction that contemporary history remained as relevant as ever, and added that they would remain true to the vision of the founding editors. However, on Niall Ferguson’s prompting, the editorial team announced that the journal would now ‘set itself the task of achieving a truly global reach’. This was one of his lasting contributions to the journal, the other being his ingenious definition of contemporary history as ‘history within the memory of some persons now living’. ⁸⁴ In conformity with this definition, the period before 1914 was now excised from the journal’s purview, and a few issues later, the First World War as well. In due course, and before very long, the period covered by the journal will have to make another jump, most likely to the 1930s.

Niall Ferguson’s principal reason for accepting Laqueur’s invitation to join the editorial team was a feature of the job that made it attractive to others too, namely that it enabled one to keep one’s finger on the pulse of the younger generation of historians through reading the articles they submitted. However, he was embarking at this time on what soon became a major career in the media, making a series of successful and popular television series on the British Empire, the role of money in modern history, the rise of European civilization to world dominance, and many other subjects. It became clear that the time available to him for reading articles sent in to the journal was rapidly becoming more scarce. On one occasion when his fellow-editors disagreed on whether or not to accept an article, and needed his deciding vote, it took several months to reach him, even by email: when he eventually replied, with the unforgettable opening line ‘Finally I have found an Internet café in Ulan Bator’, it was clear that his rise to global media fame was making his role in the journal impossible. After a frank but entirely amicable discussion of the problem, he graciously threw in the towel, and from July 2008 onwards his name no longer appeared on the masthead.

By this time, Joanna Bourke had resigned as Review Editor, at the end of 2007. She did not want to oversee the transition which the editors had decided on, from review articles, which would of course still appear, to a full review section with twenty or more reviews of individual books; and in any case, a decade in the extremely onerous position of Review Editor seemed long enough. As the editors noted:

Joanna Bourke has commissioned over a hundred surveys, and they have become an integral part of each issue. The topics they have covered have ranged from consumerism and globalization to genocide and jazz, from Anglo-American relations in the Cold War to Islam and the Middle East, from the theory and methodology of contemporary history to recent studies of gender and sexuality and the history of sport. They have provided an invaluable service to scholars in the field of contemporary history and brought new readers to the journal. They have helped emphasize the breadth and variety of work in contemporary history and contributed further to establishing it as a serious scholarly discipline. ⁸⁵

The editors commissioned Kristina Spohr, who had previously been Review Editor of Cold War History at the London School of Economics, assisted by James Björk, of King’s College London, to undertake the task, which she has done ever since with energy and aplomb. However, the number of review articles published in each volume, beginning with an impressive 83 in 2009, has fallen in subsequent years to 50, 48, 31 and 21, largely because of the increasing number of special issues, which do not carry book reviews. It is to be hoped that the number of book reviews will begin to grow again in the next few years.

There were also major logistical changes, more or less forced on the journal at this time. In 1994 Walter Laqueur had retired as Director of the Wiener Library, but the Journal of Contemporary History continued to occupy a small office on the top floor of the Devonshire Street building until the end of 2007, by which time most of its business was being conducted via email, and the elaborate apparatus of typewriters, fax machines, manuscript files and letters was no longer needed: thus the last remaining link with the Wiener Library was severed. The imminent expiry of the lease on the building, for which the Library had laid an extremely modest rent, was also a factor leading to the abandonment of the office. The move prompted a series of other major changes in the management of the journal. Aileen Kent, its long-serving Assistant Editor, who had dealt with all the journal’s business, correspondence, copy-editing, proof-reading and much more besides, took the opportunity to retire, and was replaced by Jeremy Toynbee, who handled this business from his office in Great Bardfield, Essex. With his help, the editors introduced a system of peer review for the articles submitted (including conference papers and special issues), and over the following years he built up an extensive address list of experts to consult. Each article that passes the initial hurdle of approval in principle by the editors now goes to two or three peer reviewers, whose reports are decisive on the issue of whether to accept an article, refer it back for changes, or reject. The energy, expertise and dedication that peer reviewers invest in their reports never ceases to impress. A few of those consulted do not bother to write more than a couple of lines, but they are in a tiny minority, and are not asked again. The journal indeed has come to depend on its peer reviewers, who have helped immeasurably in improving its quality.

The July 2007 issue was the last to instruct contributors to submit their articles in ‘two copies typed and double-spaced (including footnotes) on A4 paper as well as an IBM-compatible disk’. ⁸⁶ From October 2007 articles were to be submitted by email only. However, this arrangement did not last long. In 2006, SAGE Publications had entered into a partnership with ScholarOne, a web-based journal article and peer review submission system, which since July 2008 has been used as the site for all article submissions, peer reviews, correspondence and editorial verdicts. These rapid adjustments to technological change have made the business of editing and producing the journal far easier than before. As the journal moves into the digital age, visits to the online edition and downloads of articles have been increasing steadily, while each year there has been a small but discernible fall in conventional subscriptions. However, whether as a physical product or an online presence, the journal continues to take the same fundamental form, of special issues, stand-alone article collections, review articles, and book reviews. The journal remains widely read and cited in every part of the world, most of all in North America, but also on the European Continent and in the UK, and continues to hold its place in the top rank of scholarly historical periodicals.

The beginning of 2008 also saw some further significant changes to the journal’s modus operandi. Over the years, the founding editors had accumulated a substantial balance with SAGE in the journal’s account, and the new editorial team decided to use it to fund one conference a year to the tune of £4000 on the condition that the successful applicant gave the journal first refusal on publication of the papers. This led almost immediately to a very substantial increase in the frequency of special issues, of which there had been relatively few in the 1990s and early 2000s. George Mosse himself had contributed to a special issue on the aesthetics of fascism in April, 1996, but the next special issue came out in January 2000, edited by Jay Winter, on shell-shock in the First World War. In 2003, however, the frequency of special issues picked up again. In January 2003 Catherine Merridale edited ‘Redesigning the Past: History in Political Transitions’, in July 2003 there was a special issue on ‘Sport and Politics’, and in April 2004 I put together an issue on ‘Understanding Nazi Germany’ consisting mostly of a series of Trevelyan Lectures delivered at Cambridge by distinguished historians such as Ian Kershaw and Richard Bessel. In October 2004 Joanna Bourke edited a collection of articles on the memory of war, and two issues later, in April 2005, there was a special issue edited by Paul Betts on ‘Domestic Dreamworlds: Notions of Home in Post-1945 Europe’, and in April 2006 Catherine Merridale edited another, on combat motivation in war. Even before the conference subsidies came into play, therefore, a remarkable increase in the number of special issues had taken place. A major reason for this, and for the continuing submission of proposals for special issues, was the fact that conference proceedings were now far easier to access if they were online, as the contributions to the journal now were, than if they were put between the covers of a book of essays. Since they were not peer-reviewed, too, essay collections were less likely to count in research assessments and judgments of an author’s career performance than articles in a journal.

Thus the journal was reverting to something like the form it had taken in its early years, a development also evident in the pioneering nature of many of the special issues, which included international relief efforts at the end of the Second World War, edited by Jessica Reinisch (July 2008), the history of Nazi concentration camps, edited by Nikolaus Wachsmann and Christian Goeschel (July 2010), contemporary history and the historical discipline, edited by Jan Palmowski and Kristina Spohr (July 2011), the USSR and Eastern Europe at international fairs (January 2012), edited by Györgi Petéri, the Fischer Controversy 50 years on, edited by Annika Mombauer (April 2013), migration in modern Germany (January 2014), refugees and the nation-state in Europe 1919–59, edited by Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch (July 2014), and demobilization after the First World War, edited by Max Edele and Robert Gerwarth (January 2015). As these special issues indicated, the weight of the journal’s emphasis was now indeed finally moving to the post-1945 era, though contributions on earlier periods since the end of the First World War were still appearing.

The journal also began increasing in extent. With the larger format introduced in the Marwickian attempted revolution of 1997, the journal’s size fell from 752 pages to 664; for the next few years it hovered just under the 700 mark, then in 2005 it increased to 814 pages, remaining near this extent in 2006 at 787. The increased extent was agreed with the publishers in order to reduce the extensive backlog of accepted articles that had accumulated in the years preceding Walter Laqueur’s retirement. The following two volumes were 710 and 726 pages respectively, before the growing number of special issues pushed the page extent up to 804 in 2009 and then to 911 in 2010. Volume 46 set a new record in 2011 with 952 pages, and the new, longer extent was maintained in 2012 with 910 pages, 898 in 2013, and 876 in 2014. At the same time, the acceptance rate for articles was falling almost continuously, not least because the frequent special issues were putting a squeeze on stand-alone articles; it is now just over 25 per cent. Finally, the editors have made strenuous efforts to reduce the time-lapse between submission of an article, acceptance, and publication: this is now a maximum of two years, but most articles that are accepted can expect publication sooner than this. Pre-publication in digital form, which began in 2014, makes a further contribution to this process.

There will be further changes in volume 51, beginning in January 2016, the exact fiftieth anniversary of the first issue. Stanley Payne, who turned 80 in 2014, is retiring, and this is his last issue. He has made a vital contribution to the changes that have taken place in the journal over the last ten years, and his judgment on an extremely wide range of articles has been faultless. He will be replaced by Mary C. Neuburger, of the University of Texas at Austin, maintaining the founders’ tradition of an editorial team straddling the Atlantic. She specializes in post-1945 Southeastern Europe with interests in urban culture, consumption, gender and nationalism. She has published two monographs, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Cornell University Press 2004), and Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Cornell University Press 2012); thus her area of specialization neatly complements those of her co-editor. Kristina Spohr is also taking the opportunity to leave her post as Review Editor, and will be replaced by Eirini Karamouzi, who is currently Lecturer in History at the University of Sheffield, and works on post-1945 Western Europe and more generally on the history of Greece and the Balkans. With this renewal of the editorial team, the journal can look forward with confidence to the future.

The recent pace of change in the publishing world has been dizzying. For the first three decades of its existence, the Journal of Contemporary History could carry on more or less in its original form. Its founding editors, Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse, ran it in 1995 in much the same way as they had run it when they set it up in 1965. There were, perhaps, fewer special issues, and the weight of coverage had shifted a little, with a smaller number of articles on the pre-1914 years and a larger number on the years since 1945. But in retrospect, the short-lived irruption of Arthur Marwick onto the editorial team heralded a series of far-reaching changes. The death of George Mosse in 1999 and the advent of new editors, followed after a short interval by the retirement of Walter Laqueur, coincided with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and with them the transition of the journal into the digital age. Yet while managing this transition with success, the editors have maintained the character given to the journal by its founders. The founding editors’ focus on cultural and social history, on historiography, and more generally on the major issues of contemporary history, has continued into the twenty-first century; the journal does not publish social or political science contributions, quantitative economic history, or, with rare exceptions, conventional essays in diplomatic history and the history of international relations. The increase in the frequency of special issues and the fact that a proportion of these are dedicated to new areas of cultural and social and historiography, have brought the journal closer once more to the vision of its founders. As it enters its second half-century, that vision looks set to endure.