Resources
and suggestions for graduate students interested in law and history:
In the first weeks of graduate school, you should
familiarize yourself with some basic research sources and begin to investigate
journals relating to your particular interests. You should start to make it a
practice to try to read at least one or two of the major journals relating to
your research interests, both so that you become familiar with recent books
published in that area (through book reviews) and so that you can begin to
learn what sorts of research is being done by reading articles published in the
journal.
For students interested in law and history, there are
several on line research tools and journals of particular importance.
a) On line resources:
LexisNexis: The major on line reference for
students of legal history is LexisNexis, which is a
link to case and statutory law, as well as to law review articles. At UF, a
basic form of lexis (“baby lexis”) is available on the Library West webpage, through “Quick Links,” or by clicking LexisNexis. (Note
that you cannot access LexisNexis through the
Hein online: While lexis has most major law reviews, it does
not have full runs of many of the most important law reviews (such as Harvard
Law Review). To get articles published before 1995, you often have to go to
Hein Online, which has complete runs of many of the standard law reviews, as
well as several legal journals published in
Jstor and Project Muse: These two databases
are online collections of many of the major history journals, as well as other
journals that may be of interest to history students. As is the case with LexisNexis, neither has complete coverage of all journals.
You can browse these systems by journal, looking through tables of contents, or
do global searches. Both are available through the library’s “Quick Links”
connection, or by clicking here. *JSTOR and *Project Muse.
b) Important journals:
Legal history: Probably the premier legal history journal
published in the
American history: The basic journal of American History is
the Journal of American History. Other journals of general interest to
students of American history are the Journal of Social History, the American
Historical Review, and Radical History Review, none of which is
exclusively limited to American history, but typically publish at least one
article on American history in each volume. Somewhat more specialized journals
of interest to students of US History are: William and Mary Quarterly (which
covers the colonial period through roughly 1850), Journal of Southern
History (which deals with the Southern United States), Journal of Urban
History, Journal of Women’s History, and the Journal of Negro
History are other journals which deal with US History topics and often
carry articles of interest to students of legal history.
Law reviews: These are journals published by law schools,
usually edited by law students. They are typically focused on contemporary
legal issues, but increasingly some of the major law reviews (notably Stanford
and Yale) publish articles that deal with legal history. Some of these articles
are quite good; others are attempts at history done by people whose background
is in law, not history.
Review articles: Most history journals have entire sections
devoted to reviewing recent books, typically the book reviews that these
journals publish are about 800 words long, which is long enough to give you an
idea of what the book is about, but not much more. One exception to this rule,
and an excellent journal to become familiar with, is Reviews in American
History, which is available online through Project Muse. This journal is
exclusively devoted to publishing essays reviewing recent books in US History, the reviews it publishes are typically two or three
times longer than the usual book review.
a) H-Net:
H-Net is a family of online listservs
relating to history and social science. Joining one or more of the lists is a
good way to connect into particular fields of history, and learn about recent
publications in the field (h-net runs an extensive book review service) and
about conferences and grants. Joining is straightforward, go to the H-net home
page at http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/ and
click on the link to discussion networks. From there, you will see a list of
links to the various networks, clicking on any of those links takes you to a
description of the network and provides information about joining if you are
interested. In addition to providing the discussion networks, H-Net has two
other services of particular interest to graduate students. One is a link to
announcements, which includes information about fellowships, calls for papers,
and conferences. The second, which is mostly of interest to advanced graduate
students, is the H-Net job guide, which provides listings of jobs in a variety
of fields of history.
b) Conferences and workshops:
Giving papers at conferences is an excellent way to make
contacts in the historical profession and begin to polish your research with an
eye towards publishing an article in a journal. While there is no set time line
for giving papers, or getting published, as a general rule it is not a bad idea
to try to give at least one or two papers at a conference before you go on the
job market, and to try to submit at least one article before you defend your
dissertation. With this in mind, it is good to try to think of papers that you
write for your classes as preliminary drafts of conference papers or articles,
and to work with professors to try to turn those papers into work that you can
present or try to publish.
Once you have identified a paper that you might present at a
conference it is a good idea to talk to members of your committee about where
you might submit the paper. Every year, there are graduate student workshops,
often run by graduate students at a particular school and focused on a
particular theme. These provide a good introduction to a professional
conference, and often are a way to meet and make contact with other students
who are working in areas related to yours. There are also conferences run by
state or regional historical associations, these are also excellent places to
meet people and give papers early in your career. Once you have learned the
ropes at one of these local or regional conferences, you should consider giving
a paper at a national conference. Three you might consider are the Social
Science History Conference (which meets every fall and has a call for papers in
early spring), the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association, which
is also in the fall and is usually somewhere relatively close to Gainesville,
or at the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (history up to
1840), which meets in July. These are major conferences, and places that
provide an opportunity to meet important historians in your field, but they are
also relatively relaxed conferences. The major conference for legal historians
is the meeting of the American Society for Legal Historians, which is in the
fall as well. It is a low key conference, but its participants involve a mix of
people from law schools and history departments, which can be daunting at times
and it prefers that people who wish to present submit entire panels involving
several papers and a commentator. This requires you to know other historians
and to have networked, something you can do if you have gone to other, smaller
conferences first.
c) Articles:
Ideally, after presenting a paper at a conference or two,
you are ready to revise it to turn it into an article. Choosing a journal to
publish in, and working to make a seminar or conference paper publishable, is
something you need to work on with a member of your dissertation committee. At
the same time, you can familiarize yourself with the sorts of opportunities for
publication on your own. One place to think about publishing an article is a
regional or state historical journal. Many states have them; some cities (such
as