History of the Present

History of the Present is a journal devoted to history as a critical endeavor. Its aim is twofold: to create a space in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in making categories of contemporary debate appear inevitable, natural, or culturally necessary; and to publish work that calls into question certainties about the relationship between past and present that are taken for granted by the majority of practicing historians. The journal encourages critical examination of both history's influence on politics and the politics of history as a discipline. Indeed, at a moment when history and the social sciences seem preoccupied with the fantasy of retrieving precritical empirical knowledge, a journal committed to history as a form of critique is more necessary than ever. Instead of writing about "history" from the abstract philosophical or historiographical perspectives that predominate today, History of the Present offers a rigorous, theoretically informed alternative based mainly on evidence from archives, texts, and other sources.