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The American Historical Review Skills
<p align="center"> <img src="assets/cover.svg" alt="The American Historical Review cover" width="220"> </p>
English | 简体中文
Agent skill stack for manuscripts targeted at The American Historical Review (AHR) — the flagship journal of the historical profession and the official publication of the American Historical Association (AHA), founded in 1895 and published by Oxford University Press (since 2023). The AHR publishes scholarship across all periods and all places of the human past — ancient to contemporary; Africa, Asia, Oceania, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas — and is read by historians of every field.
This repository is opinionated, and it is humanities, not social science. There is no data-availability or replication policy, no statistical-significance bar, and no results tables here. An AHR article is a historiographical intervention built on primary sources, read critically, and argued in clear prose with Chicago-style footnotes. This stack is not a social-science template renamed for history — it is about argument, archives, interpretation, and the historian's craft.
What Is the AHR, and Why a Dedicated Stack?
The AHR's constraints differ from a social-science journal or a specialist history journal:
| Constraint | The AHR | Implication |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | All periods, all places of history; English-language | The article must matter to historians beyond your subfield |
| Premium on | A historiographical intervention grounded in primary sources | A source dump or a local-only finding is off-fit |
| Method | Social, cultural, intellectual, political, global, micro — judged on own terms | Do not force one template; there is no single "history method" |
| Publisher / owner | Oxford University Press / AHA | Submit via ScholarOne, not a social-science portal |
| Review model | Double-blind / anonymous, ≥ 6 readers | Mask the manuscript; expect intensive expert reports |
| Timeline / acceptance | Decision in 6–8 months; ~8–10% accepted | Plan a long cycle; significance and craft are decided early |
| Length | Ideally ≤ 8,000 words of text, excluding notes | The substantial note apparatus does not count toward the target |
| Style | Chicago Manual of Style footnotes; no bibliography, no in-text citation | Not author-date; all citation lives in the notes |
| Sources | Primary-source criticism is the core discipline | Provenance, bias, silences, representativeness all matter |
| Images | Author clears permissions; alt-text required on every figure | Budget time for rights; write alt-text up front |
| Fees | No author processing fees | Do not budget an APC for submission/publication |
Volatile specifics (current editor and term, exact word/notes figures, whether an abstract is required, OA/APC options, review counts and timelines) change — items not directly confirmed are marked 待核实 in resources/official-source-map.md. Verify on the official journal page.
What the AHR publishes
- Research articles — original, argument-driven history, ideally ≤ 8,000 words of text.
- Reviews — a large commissioned section (~650/year) of books, exhibits, films, podcasts,
video games, and digital history. Reviews are invited, not author-solicited.
- Distinctive forms — features such as History Unclassified, History Lab, AHR Syllabus, and
Art as Historical Method that experiment with how history is written and presented.
Quick Start
Option A — Claude Code Plugin (recommended)
/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills
/plugin install ahr-skills
/reload-pluginsOption B — Manual Copy
git clone https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills.git
cd awesome-journal-skills/American-Historical-Review-Skills
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -R skills/ahr-* ~/.claude/skills/
# or
mkdir -p ~/.codex/skills && cp -R skills/ahr-* ~/.codex/skills/First Prompt
Use ahr-workflow to tell me which skill I should use next for my AHR manuscript.Default Workflow
ahr-topic-selection
▼
ahr-historiography-positioning
▼
ahr-argument-development
▼
ahr-sources-and-archives
▼
ahr-interpretation-and-method
▼
ahr-structure-and-exposition
▼
ahr-writing-style (polish)
▼
ahr-citation-and-style
▼
ahr-review-process
▼
ahr-submission
▼
ahr-revision-and-responseahr-workflow is the router — it tells you which skill to use next based on where you are. History rarely moves in a straight line: most projects loop argument ↔ sources ↔ interpretation many times as the archive talks back before the structure and prose settle.
Skills
| Skill | Purpose |
|---|---|
ahr-workflow | Router — decides which sub-skill to invoke next |
ahr-topic-selection | Significance to the whole discipline; is this an AHR-scale question? |
ahr-historiography-positioning | Frame the article as an intervention, not a report |
ahr-argument-development | Turn archival findings into a sustained, contestable thesis |
ahr-sources-and-archives | Primary vs. secondary; source criticism; archival citation; image permissions |
ahr-interpretation-and-method | Choose and defend an interpretive lens and scale |
ahr-structure-and-exposition | Weave narrative and analysis within the ~8,000-word target |
ahr-writing-style | Lucid, narrative-aware prose for historians across fields |
ahr-citation-and-style | Chicago notes — no bibliography, no in-text citation; the note apparatus |
ahr-review-process | Double-blind review, ≥ 6 readers, 6–8 months, 8–10% acceptance |
ahr-submission | ScholarOne preflight (masking, length, notes, format, alt-text, exclusivity) |
ahr-revision-and-response | Response-letter strategy for multiple expert reports + editor |
Resources
resources/external_tools.md— archives and finding aids (ArchiveGrid / WorldCat / national archives), digitized databases (JSTOR / Gale / EEBO-ECCO), transcription/OCR (Transkribus), and Chicago-notes reference tooling (Zotero / BibLaTeX)resources/official-source-map.md— official AHA / Oxford URLs behind every fact, with 待核实 markers on unverified items
What This Repo Does Not Do
- It does not write a submittable article for you, and it never invents or embellishes a source
- It does not simulate any specific editor's or reviewer's taste
- It does not assert volatile metadata (current editor and term, exact word/notes figures, abstract
requirement, OA/APC options) — verify on the official page; unverified items are marked 待核实
- It does not decide whether your question is of general historical significance — that is the
historian's call
- It does not apply a social-science template (hypotheses, data sections, replication packages) — the
AHR has none of those
Related
- awesome-journal-skills — Index of journal-specific skill packs
- The American Historical Review (Oxford Academic) — publisher home
- AHR at the AHA — owner, submission guidelines, reviews
License
MIT