In the last few years, the AHR has published four “Conversations,” each on a subject of interest to a wide range of historians: “On Transnational History” (2006), “Religious Identities and Violence” (2007), “Environmental Historians and Environmental Crisis” (2008), and “Historians and the Study of Material Culture” (2009). For each the process has been the same: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic, who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation, which is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue. The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging consideration of an important topic at a high level of expertise, in which the participants are recruited across several fields and periods. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to undertake. In a sense, this year's topic, “Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information,” pays homage to the very process that enables the AHR Conversation in the first place. After all, this project would have been inconceivable before the Internet and electronic mail made possible the kind of instantaneous communication that we now largely take for granted. One has to be rather young not to marvel at the ease of communicating and staying connected in this era of Facebook and the Web. Interestingly, however, one of the themes of the following discussion is the need to reject the kind of thinking that celebrates (or perhaps bemoans) technological developments in communication in terms of “rupture” or other such proclamations of new media “ages.” Rather, the participants call our attention not so much to dramatic transformations as to the actual modes, techniques, and social interactions that have characterized communication in all times and places.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 59 citations exist upstream.