Grant Wong, JDP History '21, served as the JBHR's Editor-in-Chief in 2020-2021. In this piece, he reminisces on his experiences with the journal and its growth over the years. Grant is currently earning his PhD in history at the University of South Carolina. If there’s anything I learned from being Editor-in-Chief of the James Blair Historical Review — forever and always “the premier, peer-reviewed undergraduate history research publication at the College of William & Mary” — it’s that a good historian never stops learning.
Is this a clichéd, uncontroversial, and uninspired take? Of course it is. But it’s true all the same. When I first joined the staff of the JBHR as a peer reviewer in my freshman year, I can’t say I knew very much of anything, let alone history. I suppose I was just critically minded enough to make the cut. I made it in the same year that I learned historians could disagree with each other and that it isn’t a good idea to read Mark Twain literally. That’s college. You live and you learn in the hope that one day you’ll know enough to not have to learn more, until you realize you’re missing the point. There’s always more to know. Slowly but surely, I progressed, getting a better sense of what exactly “history” is. As a third-year History Ph.D. student at the University of South Carolina, I can now say with greater certainty that history is a messy combination of subjective interpretation and scientific logic. It is impossible to write history without making some sort of argument about the past. This truism is inherent to the craft. To say something—anything—meaningful about history from a scholarly perspective, one must make their case for why they think the past was how it was and why this matters (the argument) using what fragmentary evidence of it they can muster (primary sources) to contribute to an ongoing conversation about why we’re getting it right or wrong, or whether we’re even asking the correct questions to begin with (engaging with historiography). The toughest part of all this is the fact that because history is an art founded upon the interpretation of evidence, it’s impossible to get entirely right, and it’s always possible to get wrong. Joining the JBHR as a peer reviewer, I learned what it meant to read, write, and understand history by critiquing it. What is this article saying? Is its argument supported by the evidence it presents? If so, does it make a good enough case for any of us to care about what it’s saying? These are the questions every peer reviewer asks and answers of every single article submitted to the JBHR. No article stops there, as all submissions still go through the Editorial Board, who, with the guidance of the peer reviewers’ hard-earned assessments, evaluate the work all over again. As it happens, by the time I was appointed the next Editor-in-Chief of the JBHR on the eve of my senior year, I, alongside pretty much everyone else in my generation, collectively realized we were living through times that would undoubtedly make history. It was the spring of 2020: the season of COVID-19, George Floyd, and Donald Trump. It would be dishonest for me to say that I went into my new position with a well-thought-out, socially conscious vision of speaking truth to power. Still, what was happening in the world around me certainly compelled me to strengthen a publication that could help people better understand how we got here. No academic journal will ever get as big a readership as The New York Times, and as much as I love the JBHR, I doubt it’ll ever enjoy the reach of The Flat Hat. But that’s not to say that it’s unimportant; far from it. What the JBHR does—what all historical journals do—is cultivate our collective understanding of the past by giving a platform to thoughtful, rigorous, original, and engaging historical research. Beyond this, those who work for such journals constantly learn by doing. Every peer review is a new lesson learned in reading, writing, and understanding. Even those resilient student-historians whose scholarship is rejected by the JBHR will come away from its submissions process having learned something, as the Editorial Board provides their peer reviewer feedback to the authors of every article they consider. This is the ideal for an academic journal, and as Editor-in-Chief, I tried as best as I could to realize this in practice with the JBHR. My aims were twofold: first, publish a journal my staff and I could be proud of, and second, rebuild the JBHR into a student organization with real staying power. I’ll fully admit the JBHR was on uncertain ground for much of my tenure, as just before I became Editor-in-Chief, the curveball of COVID-19 forced the journal into hiatus just as most of its Editorial Board was about to graduate. I say “most” because I was on it, albeit in the obsolete role of “Webpage Manager,” which was separate from the journal’s governance and just involved uploading articles to the journal’s ScholarWorks page. Through the summer and fall of 2020, I reviewed applications for the Editorial Board, making my picks largely off gut instinct, and began recruiting a new cohort of peer reviewers. Once I had everyone assembled, we hit the ground running. I would be remiss if I didn’t credit my team one last time. Zachary Clary, Kevin Diestelow, Claire Nevin, Italia Gorski, Xavier Storey, Gracie Patten, Sophia Moustaid, Grace Tramack, and all my peer reviewers made the JBHR what it was, supporting my vision for a journal that could last. Their work wasn’t easy, especially as COVID-19 continued to loom over our lives that academic year, forcing us to meet virtually and stress the hectic workloads inherent to the life of the TWAMP. (Do people still say that?) Baffled as I am by all things technical and financial, it was thanks to my Editorial Board that we secured Media Council funding, revised our approach to formatting the journal, created a new system of peer review training, and powered our way through the large backlog of submissions we brought on ourselves by expanding our outreach. For my part, I led the revisions to an outdated organizational constitution that allowed the Editor-in-Chief to singlehandedly appoint their successor and dismiss anyone from the journal at a whim. That was a fun meeting. I can’t claim we were successful in everything we did. A few peer reviewers left due to the sheer fatigue of that year, as well as an unfortunate confusion of peer reviewing for fact-checking. Ambitious initiatives foundered as we focused on simply keeping the journal alive. The JBHR blog, for instance, was a defunct project from my tenure that, thanks to the journal’s current staff, is seeing the light of day again in 2024. And speaking as one of the few people of color to serve on the Review’s Editorial Board, I would have liked to have done more to encourage greater racial and ethnic diversity within our staff. In the end, we published two excellent issues and restored the JBHR to a print publication. We did our part. The Review still exists, which I consider an unqualified success after all the tumult of the 2020-2021 academic year. Of course, I cannot claim any of this credit as my own. I’d have been nothing as Editor-in-Chief without my staff, and the current JBHR owes everything to the cohorts that succeeded mine, in all senses of the word. I’ve never been so happy to be surpassed. That’s the JBHR for you. Like the history it publishes, it is a perpetual work-in-progress. As I find myself learning and re-learning everything I know about the past and the present in my life as a Ph.D. student, I’m comforted by the fact that the JBHR too has continued to change. I can’t say it’s my baby anymore. It’s become something entirely new, and it’s all the better for it. It may not even be the James Blair Historical Review for much longer. The journal is currently exploring a renaming in light of Blair’s role in making the College a slaveholding institution, a move I fully support. We’ll both keep on growing and learning, and learning by doing.
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Above: "Bookstore (Taliaferro Hall) - Interior," 1994-06, Special Collections: University Archives Photo Collection.
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