About

The mission of NAA is to foster the empirical reconstruction of the American past. NAA strives to advance this object principally through the peer-reviewed publication of edited source material. We pursue reconstruction within a hemispheric frame, welcoming submissions of sources that illuminate the history of any part of the Americas before 1825 A.D. We accept all varieties of source submissions, from traditional texts, such as transcriptions of unpublished manuscripts or new English translations, to more novel forms of evidence, such as numerical or linguistic representations of data gathered from material objects.

NAA also aims to chart a new domain of trans-disciplinary early American scholarship, one dedicated to the dual-pronged study of reception and antiquation. By reception, we mean the process by which the knowledge of a practice, idea, or institution is restored or enhanced over time. By antiquation, we mean the inverse, or the process by which knowledge is diminished over time. NAA solicits scholarship concerned with reconstructing these processes as well as the terminal states of knowledge they create, which we call hegemony and obsolescence.

The scholarly mission of NAA is to study reception and antiquation as they occurred in the American past, while simultaneously contributing to the ongoing process of reception by offering transparent, discoverable, and accessible historical data to the intellectual community.