The academic year began in the usual way: meeting the new editorial team and finding someone to serve as the managing editor of the entire journal, a position of high responsibility. Daniel Olivas stepped forward, managing the flow of submissions and making authors anonymous so that the team could assess them as objectively as possible. The group discussed what theme might tie the submissions together without excluding any time or place in history, settling on “The Human Condition.” Then the team solicited submissions and started evaluating them and generating developmental feedback. The crisis created by the Kincade Fire of October 2019 interrupted the process, as with all campus instruction, but the team resumed meeting and was running very smoothly by the spring of 2020. Several submissions were ready for copy-editing, several more were out for revisions, and—with the impeachment of the U.S. President creating a sense of duty to record some history in the making—all of the editors picked timely topics on which they would write essays in order to add to the record for future historians. At the March fifth meeting, the team added coronavirus to the list of topics.

We had no idea then that we would never meet again. The global pandemic became the most urgent unfolding event in human history, and we all retreated to our homes. As the instructor of the course, I did not know how we would accomplish our mission, which had always culminated in a launch party with refreshments, music, and a nice stack of beautifully bound journals, hot off the press, with the names of the authors and editors in print. When we tuned in for our first Zoom session, I was primarily concerned with connecting with the students and seeing how they were managing the crisis.

Daniel Olivas unveiled his solution for our course, the google sites page you are now reading. It was also his idea to create a coronavirus archive of memes related to the pandemic, and then the members of the editorial team captured different angles on the ongoing crisis in essays. One editor, who had to stay on campus while it emptied of students and filled with emergency workers, patients, and the unsheltered, gives a riveting primary account of trying to reach family in Canada.

Under the most trying conditions, this team pulled together something valuable, something that honors the scholarly essays that made it through the production process before the crisis hit as well as the present, and the humanity that is living through it. History teaches us how we reached the present, and why it looks the way it does. It also teaches us that it is those who are living and dying now who will shape the future.

Amy Kittelstrom

Professor of History