Letter from the Advisor

Abstract

Letter from the Advisor Professor Ruth Mostern This is my final semester as Faculty Advisor to the Undergraduate Historical Journal at UC Merced. The four years that I have spent in this role have been one of my great satisfactions as a UC Merced faculty member, and it is with regret that I am now moving on. Paradoxically, what has made me proudest of all is that I have had almost nothing to do with success of the journal. In the Fall of 2013, it was a group of students who approached me with their own well-developed plan for an undergraduate history research journal. Neither I nor anyone else on the faculty put them up to it. It was the students who got approval to publish with the California Digital Library eScholarship program, and it was they who assembled an editorial board and drafted bylaws, procedures, and editorial guidelines. The journal has been fully in the hands of its student editorial boards and its student authors ever since. I have been sitting on the sidelines and cheered them on. Occasionally I ask the editors whether they want any feedback or advice from me, and usually they politely and respectfully turn me down. I would not want it any other way! The excellence of the scholarship and the quality of the editing is consistently outstanding. The Undergraduate Historical Journal has not missed an issue since it began, in spite of the fact that its editors have a pesky habit of graduating just as they start to get the hang of things. To date, not including the present issue, the journal has published twenty-five articles and eleven book reviews, and I am confident that it will be a fixture of the intellectual life of UC Merced for many years to come. The current issue features a typically strong and diverse collection of scholarship that includes seven articles and a number of senior thesis abstracts. The articles concern Mexico, England, and the United States; they include papers on global geopolitics and our own town of Merced, and they span three hundred years of time. Collectively they reveal the curiosity, creativity, and accomplishments of the History students of UC Merced. I know how hard the authors and the editorial board have worked to bring this issue to fruition and to maintain the whole journal venture. My warmest congratulations to all of you. Fiat Lux! Ruth Mostern Associate Professor of History Faculty Advisor to the Journal May 15, 2017