What is ethnohistory?: A sixty-year retrospective

Abstract

In honor of Ethnohistory's sixtieth anniversary, this paper compiles data on the journal and analyzes patterns and trends throughout the publication. We divided observations into four categories: (1) authorship of each article, particularly focusing on gender in authorship and coauthorship, (2) the region represented in each article, (3) the topic, and (4) data sources used by the author(s). We then analyzed each category in representative ten-year intervals from 1954 to 2013. Such data reveals trends that mirror intellectual, scholarly, and demographic changes in the social sciences overall. Female authorship, for example, steadily increases until the most recent decade, while coauthorship shows steady growth in raw numbers, but still represents a varying percentage with each decade. The North American region composes the majority of regional representation since the beginning, but Latin American regional representation as well as that outside of the Americas, shows significant increases over time. Meanwhile, fluctuating topics and data sources demonstrate diversification and expanding breadth within Ethnohistory.