After the most recent round of earthquakes, mudslides, and fires, when Southern California was finally abandoned, many of the collections of the Huntington Library were brought to the ever-expanding Capital Archive here in Winnipeg. A friend in the Manuscripts Division called our attention to a particular file labeled ‘Historiography: Correspondence’ – donated anonymously but compiled, we think, by a professional historian of an earlier time (textual evidence dates the materials to 2008 or 2009, just before the end of the paper era). The strange thing about one set of ‘letters’ in the file is that they are printed continuously, on plain paper (rather than letterhead), as if meant to be taken together and read like an essay. We here at the Journal, as we flipped through these moldering leaves, felt somewhat frustrated at not being able to see the other half of the dialogue – if the letters are anything, they are one-sided, as it were, though whoever printed them used double-sided printing – but then we realized that there probably never was a real correspondent. Who would write such fake epistles, and footnote them, to boot? And was it the author himself who printed and filed them, or some friend or acquaintance who received them on email, or perhaps a curious stranger who downloaded them from a blog? We can't even venture a guess. Nor do we embrace the letters' ‘argument’, which seems to us divided between a familiar critique of academic writing and a loose-minded complaint about academic hierarchy. Yet we have chosen to publish them here as telling historical curiosities. We presume that our readership will agree that these letters at the very least present us with a snapshot of academic culture in the early twenty-first century, a time of important transitions, filled with its share of turmoil. As the letters remind us, it was an era of small, radical journals – like Rethinking History, whose full paper run we actually have here at our offices; perhaps these old issues might prove to be grist for a valuable dissertation? Winnipeg, September 2049