Est · MMXXIV — Sine Ira et Studio — The Shortest History Book Ever WrittenSine Ira et Studio
Room IX · The Director’s Office
A scholarly reference work on a subject which, on close examination, turns out to be brief.
The Institute for Palestinian Historical Studies exists to provide a rigorous scholarly archive on the history of sovereign Palestinian statehood, governance, currency, and national leadership. The Palestinian Historical Review, its quarterly organ, first appeared in autumn MMXXIV. We follow the canonical standards of the historical profession. We make no further commitments.
The collections proceed from antiquity to the present quarter. The documentary plates are gathered in the Evidence Gallery, the cultural record in Heritage, and the registries of government, currency, and national leadership each maintain their own pages. None of them took long.
Specimen: reference volume, sovereign-statehood series. Edition: unabridged. Our library is small but representative.
Methodology
Learned societies customarily describe their methods at length. Ours permits a complete statement in two words.
We looked.
We looked where states leave traces: constitutional registers, treaty series, mint records, postal issues, census returns, the lists of envoys received at foreign courts. We looked in the catalogues of the British National Archives at Kew, the Israel State Archives, the Library of Congress, and the forty-four further institutions enumerated in our search apparatus. We looked from the Merneptah Stele (c. 1208 BCE) to the present quarter. For the fourteen successive empires that governed the territory, the traces proved abundant — coinage, tax rolls, milestones, garrison payrolls. The corresponding catalogue for a sovereign Palestinian state has also been completed. It is the shorter of the two.
The Charter
We work from documents. Claims unsupported by documents are not entertained; claims contradicted by documents are noted, with the contradiction identified.
Where the record is silent, we are silent. The temptation to supply, from inference or sympathy, content the record does not contain is the discipline’s most common failure. We resist it.
Documents are authenticated to ICA-ISAD(G) standards. Forgeries and items of doubtful provenance are excluded. To date this rule has cost the collection nothing.
Where a finding may, by inference, support or undermine a contemporary political claim, the Review records the finding without comment on its political bearing. Inferentia non est materia historiae.
Citation
The Review observes the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. Two forms are provided. For articles appearing in the Review:
For the primary documentary record of sovereign Palestinian statehood prior to MCMXLVIII, the approved form is:
Submissions
Manuscripts are reviewed under standard double-blind peer review. Median time from submission to decision: 9.4 months.
Notice · Posted MMXXIV
An expedited track is reserved for manuscripts documenting any sovereign Palestinian state, currency, head of state, or national institution established before MCMLXIV, the year the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded. Qualifying manuscripts are read the day they arrive and are guaranteed the cover of the following issue. The track has operated continuously since MMXXIV.
None Received
The Department of Primary Sources continues to invite institutional and private holders of documentary materials qualifying for the classes catalogued in our Document Archives. The desk is open during regular hours. There is no charge, and there has never been a queue.
Office Hours
The Director’s Office maintains a correspondence file and has prepared its replies in advance. This has proved efficient.
Correspondence · File IX/01
The Review presents documented fact in the format the subject’s documentary record deserves. The dates are real, the treaties are real, the coin is real, and so is the Hebrew on it. If the result reads as satire, the Editorial Board notes, with regret, that it did not write the record.3
Correspondence · File IX/02
The Institute is invented. Nothing else is. Every date, document, census figure, and coin on these pages is documented in primary or mainstream scholarly sources, and the reader is invited to check any of them. The one item we could not document is the subject.
Correspondence · File IX/03
No, and the question mistakes our subject. People appear throughout the record — in Jund Filasṭīn, in Ottoman registers, in Mandate censuses — and no page of this Review says otherwise. What we catalogue are states: constitutions, currencies, seated heads of state. The people appear in the record. The state does not.
Correspondence · File IX/04
By the modesty of its requirements. An archive holding zero documents is inexpensive to insure, climate-control, and guard.
Correspondence · File IX/05
The Institute maintains no premises. The complete sovereign-statehood holdings travel comfortably, and the reading room (pictured above) is open whenever the reader is.
Correspondence · File IX/06
The Board serves anonymously, in sympathy with its subject. Readers who wish to picture us are directed to the portrait frames in the National Leaders gallery, which are available.
Correspondence · File IX/07
The Registrar of Corrections maintains a register of substantiated errors. It currently resembles our other registers. Correspondence is nonetheless welcome; the Office has been waiting since MMXXIV.
Correspondence · File IX/08
One document. A constitution, a coin, a treaty concluded in the name of a sovereign Palestinian state before MCMXLVIII — any single item from the classes catalogued in the Archives. The expedited track above was built for exactly this purpose. It is not congested.
Correspondence · File IX/09
Through the Archives page, where submissions have been accepted since MMXXIV and received never. The first would be, in the literal sense, historic.
Colophon
The Palestinian Historical Review is published quarterly, in electronic form, by the Institute for Palestinian Historical Studies. It is set in Fraunces and Newsreader; the catalogue apparatus is set in Courier Prime. There is no print edition, no office, and no warehouse. The holdings did not require one.
An International Standard Serial Number is issued on evidence that a publication exists. The Review supplied the evidence and was registered without difficulty. It commends the procedure to its subject.
Where the record is silent, we are silent.
