This roundtable session brings together five scholars to share their views about and experiences of editing projects that present peace history in academic handbooks, book series, journals, and blogs. As projects that take an entire field of scholarship into account rather than concentrating on a specific historical problem within it, the editorial experiences associated with them offer unique opportunities for specialists to engage questions about the definition of the field of peace history and potential directions for its scholarship. Although the scholarly study of peace history emerged at least as early as the 1930s, building on the efforts of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and past president of the AHA Merle Curti, historians have not reached an easy consensus on how narrowly or broadly to define the field. How to do so remains a contested topic among its practitioners because the very concept of peace itself poses numerous definitional and conceptual ambiguities, evoking different meanings reflecting variables of time, place, perspective, and context. Moreover, peace historians debate the extent to which their research could or should contribute to advocacy. In their experiences editing projects focused on peace and peace advocacy, the panelists and the chair have had to navigate and mediate such issues as:

• how to distinguish "peace history" as a coherent framework from historical scholarship that refers to peace in more incidental ways
• the tensions involved in choosing to produce specialized publications in peace history versus works of “general” history
• the distinctions between peace history and peace studies and the relationship between them
• the audience(s) targeted, such as academics, activists, and more casual readers
• the selection of editorial board members
• the relationship between history and social movements, “activist research”, and the risks and rewards of “engaged” scholarship
• how to balance acknowledging the continued value of traditional approaches (e.g., histories of movements and organizations, the diplomacy of peace treaties) while fostering new directions (e.g., intersections with environmental history, research based on data mining methods)
• establishing peace history's place in academia equal to the status long enjoyed by military history
• whether to maintain traditional and conventional modes of publication or whether and how to adapt to innovative and alternative modes of publication.

While this roundtable situates the discussion about such issues in the context of peace history, it addresses concerns of interest to editors and authors from every field of history and will therefore have broad appeal at a time when technological change and other factors are transforming the culture and infrastructure of scholarly publishing.