The Indiana Magazine of History has always sought to preserve some of these guides to the historical landscape, the diaries and letters and memoirs that help historians and other educated readers elucidate the state’s past and match people and places with their stories. We will also continue to showcase the work of those who take these materials and explain to a wider audience the significance of the stories they reveal. We may differ from our earliest predecessors in what our authors and editors, and (I think) our readers, consider significant. Indiana’s past is not something we scrutinize looking for signs of backwardness or quaintness or inferiority, an underdeveloped country whose wildness makes us feel better about our own era and to whose inhabitants’ behavior we might feel morally superior. Nor do we go searching for a golden age, an epoch of heroes whose lives vastly outshine the lesser lights of our own age of iron. We look instead for reasoned articles that focus on the subject which objective historical study can actually help us understand—how human beings deal with change.

David A. Nichols “A View from Polyptania: An Editorial Introduction,” Indiana Magazine of History 117:1, 11.