Tradition and Change: Magazines of History in Mexico in the Mid-twentieth Century

Abstract

Journals have been the subject of multiple interpretations from different disciplines and their nomenclatures, as well as their characteristics, continue to be the subject of debate. What is certain is that they are already an autonomous object of study and deserve to be further explored. In this case, the intention is to provoke a debate on academic journals from an early period in our country –mid-20th century. We take as an example the Revista de Historia de América, founded by the historian Silvio Zavala, in 1938, to transform the practice of history from a new scientific perspective. The reflective function of this text means that the intention is not to expand on this publication, but to ask how academic journals emerge and from that, to think about what they share with other types of journals. As a final reflection, we suggest that, unlike what we observe in current academic journals, their predecessors from the mid-20th century had more in common with other publications of the time than with current scientific journals.