''Current History'' is the oldest extant

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

-based publication devoted exclusively to contemporary world affairs. The magazine was founded in 1914 by George Washington Ochs Oakes, brother of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' publisher Adolph Ochs, in order to provide detailed coverage of

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

. ''Current History'' was published by the New York Times Company from its founding until 1936. Since 1942 it has been owned by members of the Redmond family; its current publisher is Daniel Mark Redmond. ''Current History'', based in Philadelphia, maintains no institutional, political, or governmental affiliation. It is published monthly, from September through May. Seven issues each year are devoted to world regions (China and East Asia, Russia and Eurasia, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, South Asia, and Africa); one issue covers current global trends; and one issue addresses a special theme such as climate change or global governance. The magazine has followed this practice of devoting each issue to a single region or theme since 1953. Each issue includes a chronology of major international events, and most contain a book review section and an article devoted to commentary. Contributors to ''Current History'' in the publication's early years included

George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from ...

, Winston Churchill,

Charles A. Beard Charles Austin Beard (1874–1948) was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor at Columbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the f ...

, Allan Nevins, and Henry Steele Commager. Grover Clark was its Beijing correspondent. More recently, the journal has featured authors such as James Schlesinger, Francis Fukuyama, Jeffrey Sachs,

Bruce Riedel Bruce O. Riedel (born 1953) is an American expert on U.S. security, South Asia, and counter-terrorism. He is currently a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Johns Hopkins Schoo ...

, Leslie H. Gelb, Bruce Russett, Elizabeth Economy, Charles Kupchan, Ivo Daalder, Joseph Cirincione, Phebe Marr, Juan Cole, Bruce Gilley, and Marina Ottaway. Shortly after ''Current History'' began publishing in 1914, its editor, Ochs Oakes, decided that a magazine recording “history in the making” should maintain as regular contributors a group of historians and social scientists. He enlisted the help of a Harvard historian, Albert Bushnell Hart, in organizing the journal’s initial group of contributing editors. ''Current History''s board of contributing editors today includes

Catherine Boone Catherine Boone is Professor of Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Boone is a specialist in property rights, political economy, and territorial politics in Africa. Education Boone earned her B.A. at t ...

(The London School of Economics and Political Science); Bruce Cumings (University of Chicago); Deborah Davis (Yale University); David B. H. Denoon (New York University); Larry Diamond (Stanford University); Michele Dunne (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace); Barry Eichengreen (University of California, Berkeley); C. Christine Fair (Georgetown University); Sumit Ganguly (Indiana University); Marshall Goldman (Wellesley College);

G. John Ikenberry Gilford John Ikenberry (October 5, 1954) is a theorist of international relations and United States foreign policy, and the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is known for his work on lib ...

(Princeton University);

Michael T. Klare Michael T. Klare is a Five Colleges (Massachusetts), Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College (Amherst, Massachusetts, USA), defense correspondent of ''The Nation'' magazine an ...

(Hampshire College);

Joshua Kurlantzick Joshua Kurlantzick is an American journalist from Baltimore, Maryland, United States. He is a Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. Career Kurlantzick was most recently a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for Internation ...

(Council on Foreign Relations); Michael McFaul (Stanford University, currently on leave); Rajan Menon (Lehigh University); Augustus Richard Norton (Boston University); Joseph Nye (Harvard University); Michael Shifter (Inter-American Dialogue); Arturo Valenzuela (Georgetown University, currently on leave); and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (University of California, Irvine). The publication's editor is Alan Sorensen. The magazine was linked to an international scandal in the run-up to World War II. ''The New York Times'' had sold ''Current History'' in 1936 to the editor Merle Tracy; in 1939 it was sold again, to an ownership group that included

Joseph Hilton Smyth Joseph Hilton Smyth (4 December 1901 – 1972) was an American publisher and pulp author. He and two associates, Walker Gray Matheson and Irvine Harvey Williams, in connection with their publishing activities, were convicted in 1942 for acting as ...

, who also acquired such magazines as ''The Living Age'' and '' The North American Review''. Smyth's association with ''Current History'' ended the same year, but he and two associates, in connection with their publishing activities, were later convicted of acting as agents for the Japanese government without registering with the State Department. ''Current History'' addressed this episode in its October 1942 issue, maintaining that Smyth during the months that he held an ownership interest in the publication did not control editorial policies."''Current History'', October 1942, pp. 137–138. According to the ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Colle ...

'', the journal has a 2014

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as ...

of 0.127, ranking it 149th out of 161 journals in the category "Political Science" and 82nd out of 85 journals in the category "International Relations".

References

External links

''Current History's'' website

''Current History''
at the HathiTrust {{DEFAULTSORT:Current History English-language journals International relations journals Publications established in 1914 Mass media in Philadelphia 9 times per year journals