The Appendix: Digital Publishing and the New "New Narrative History"

The call for ‘new narrative histories’ of radical subjects, based on rigorous archival research, dates to the early 1980s, if not earlier. What makes this historical moment so different, and the means for diffusing new ‘new narrative histories’ so much greater, are the opportunities offered by the web and e-publishing. In my remarks, I will discuss the experiences of The Appendix: A New Journal of Narrative & Experimental History; what we gain by bringing together ‘everyday’ and ‘exotic’ subjects via innovative storytelling, aimed at a wide range of readers; how the web's flexibility as a medium lets us experiment with the form and presentation of historical writing; and whether such a journal relies on the pre-existing academic structure, or allows us to imagine a new one.