Current History is the oldest United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

-based publication devoted exclusively to contemporary world affairs

Foreign Affairs

Foreign Affairs is an American magazine and website on international relations and U.S. foreign policy published since 1922 by the Council on Foreign Relations six times annually...

. The magazine was founded in 1914 by George Washington Ochs Oakes, brother of New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, in order to provide detailed coverage of World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. Current History was published by The New York Times Company

The New York Times Company

The New York Times Company is an American media company best known as the publisher of its namesake, The New York Times. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. has served as Chairman of the Board since 1997. It is headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City....

 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

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

, Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...

, Charles A. Beard

Charles A. Beard

Charles Austin Beard was, with Frederick Jackson Turner, one of the most influential American historians of the first half of the 20th century. He published hundreds of monographs, textbooks and interpretive studies in both history and political science...

, Allan Nevins

Allan Nevins

Allan Nevins was an American historian and journalist, renowned for his extensive work on the history of the Civil War and his biographies of such figures as President Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller.-Life:Born in Camp Point, Illinois, Nevins was educated at...

, and Henry Steele Commager

Henry Steele Commager

Henry Steele Commager was an American historian who helped define Modern liberalism in the United States for two generations through his forty books and 700 essays and reviews...

. More recently, the journal has featured authors such as James Schlesinger, Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. Before that he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of...

, Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist and Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. One of the youngest economics professors in the history of Harvard University, Sachs became known for his role as an adviser to Eastern European and developing country governments in the...

, Bruce Riedel

Bruce Riedel

Bruce Riedel is a Senior Fellow in foreign policy at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution, a Senior Advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group, a former CIA Analyst, a counter-terrorism expert, and an author. He retired in 2006 after 29 years with the Central...

, Leslie H. Gelb, Bruce Russett

Bruce Russett

Bruce Martin Russett is Dean Acheson Professor of Political Science and Professor in International and Area Studies, MacMillan Center, Yale University, and edited the Journal of Conflict Resolution from 1972 to 2009.- Academic career :...

, Elizabeth Economy, Charles Kupchan, Ivo Daalder, Joseph Cirincione

Joseph Cirincione

Joseph Cirincione is the President of the Ploughshares Fund, a public grant-making foundation focused on nuclear weapons policy and conflict resolution. He was appointed to the presidency by the Ploughshares board of directors on March 5, 2008...

, Phebe Marr

Phebe Marr

Phebe Marr is a prominent American historian of modern Iraq with the Middle East Institute. She has been research professor at the National Defense University and a retired professor of history at University of Tennessee and Stanislaus State University in California.-Academic career:Marr received...

, Juan Cole

Juan Cole

John Ricardo I. "Juan" Cole is an American scholar, public intellectual, and historian of the modern Middle East and South Asia. He is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. As a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, he has appeared in print and on...

, 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

Albert Bushnell Hart

Albert Bushnell Hart, Ph.D. , was an American historian, writer, and teacher. One of the first generation of professionally trained historians in the United States, a prolific author and editor of historical works, Albert Bushnell Hart became, as Samuel Eliot Morison described him, "The Grand Old...

, in organizing the journal’s initial group of contributing editors. Current History’s board of contributing editors today includes Catherine Boone (University of Texas at Austin); Bruce Cumings

Bruce Cumings

Bruce Cumings is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History at the University of Chicago and the chairperson of the history department...

 (University of Chicago); Deborah Davis (Yale University); David B. H. Denoon (New York University); Larry Diamond

Larry Diamond

Larry Diamond is a leading contemporary scholar in the field of democracy studies. He is presently a professor of Sociology and Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative policy think tank...

 (Stanford University); Michele Dunne (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace); Barry Eichengreen

Barry Eichengreen

Barry Eichengreen is an American economist who holds the title of George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987...

 (University of California, Berkeley); C. Christine Fair

C. Christine Fair

C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor in the Center for Peace and Security Studies , within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service....

 (Georgetown University); Sumit Ganguly (Indiana University); Marshall Goldman

Marshall Goldman

Marshall Goldman is an expert on the economy of the former Soviet Union. Goldman is a Professor of Economics at Wellesley College and Associate Director of the Harvard Russian Research Center. Goldman received his Ph.D. in Russian studies from Harvard University in 1961.Goldman is well known for...

 (Wellesley College); G. John Ikenberry (Princeton University); Michael T. Klare (Hampshire College); Joshua Kurlantzick

Joshua Kurlantzick

Joshua Kurlantzick is an American journalist from Baltimore, Maryland. He is currently a Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations...

 (Council on Foreign Relations); Michael McFaul

Michael McFaul

Michael Anthony McFaul is a Stanford University professor and the nominee for United States Ambassador to Russia. Prior to his nomination to the ambassadorial position, McFaul worked for the U.S. National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of Russian and...

 (Stanford University, currently on leave); Rajan Menon (Lehigh University); Augustus Richard Norton

Augustus Richard Norton

Augustus R. Norton is an American professor and retired army officer. He is currently a professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University. He is best known for his writing on Middle East politics, and as an occasional commentator on U.S...

 (Boston University); Joseph Nye

Joseph Nye

Joseph Samuel Nye, Jr. is the co-founder, along with Robert Keohane, of the international relations theory neoliberalism, developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence...

 (Harvard University); Michael Shifter

Michael Shifter

Michael Shifter is President of the Inter-American Dialogue. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Latin American Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and writes for the Council's journal Foreign Affairs....

 (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, 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."