The Journal of Modern History
academic journal

The Journal of Modern History is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering European intellectual, political, and cultural history, published by the University of Chicago Press. Established in 1929, the journal covers events from approximately 1500 to the present, with a geographical scope extending from the United Kingdom through the European continent, including Russia and the Balkans. The journal also publishes articles on topics connected with European empires and overseas expansion.
Editors and editorial board
The Journal of Modern History is coedited by John W. Boyer, Jan E. Goldstein, and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson. Previous editors include Sheila Fitzpatrick, Hanna Gray, William Hardy McNeill, and Bernadotte Schmitt.
Format and contents
The journal publishes articles and book reviews. On occasion, it has published special issues focusing on specific topics.
The Chester Penn Higby Prize
Chester Penn Higby (1886–1966) served on the history faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1927 to 1956, and was one of the founders of the Journal of Modern History. He also served as the first president of the Modern European History Section of the American Historical Association. Upon his retirement, several of his former students established a trust fund to provide a cash prize for the best article published in the journal.
“The Journal of Modern History” enters the record as academic journal. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Journal, Modern and History can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Journal of Modern History” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Journal, Modern and History provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2918516. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 1500, 1886 and 1966.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “The Journal of Modern History”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow The Journal of Modern History primary sources, The Journal of Modern History archive and Journal research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “The Journal of Modern History”?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “The Journal of Modern History” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.