Ahr workflow

AHR Workflow Router (ahr-workflow)

The orchestrator for an AHR submission. Figure out the stage of the project, then send the user to the matching skill. The AHR is the flagship journal of the historical profession — its articles are historiographical interventions built on primary sources, judged by historians across all fields. The router's first job is to make sure the project has both a significant question and a real archival basis before polishing prose.

When to trigger

• Starting a new AHR article and unsure where to begin
• Mid-project and unsure which skill applies next
• Sitting on rich archival material but no argument yet (route to ahr-argument-development)
• Returning with a decision letter (route to ahr-revision-and-response)

What the AHR is (and is not)

• It is a generalist history journal: all periods, all places, all subfields, English-language.
• It is not a social-science venue: there is no data-availability/replication policy, no statistical-significance bar, no results tables. The currency is argument, evidence, and interpretation anchored in primary sources and a historiographical conversation.

Routing map (stage → skill)

Is the question significant?        → ahr-topic-selection
Where does it sit in the field?     → ahr-historiography-positioning
What is the argument / stakes?      → ahr-argument-development
What are the sources, and how good? → ahr-sources-and-archives
How am I reading the evidence?      → ahr-interpretation-and-method
Does the article hold together?     → ahr-structure-and-exposition
Does the prose work?                → ahr-writing-style
Are the notes correct (Chicago)?    → ahr-citation-and-style
How will it be judged?              → ahr-review-process
Ready to submit?                    → ahr-submission
Got a decision / R&R?               → ahr-revision-and-response

Default order

topic-selection → historiography-positioning → argument-development → sources-and-archives → interpretation-and-method → structure-and-exposition → writing-style → citation-and-style → review-process → submission → revision-and-response

Iterate: history rarely moves in a straight line. Most projects loop argument ↔ sources ↔ interpretation many times as the archive talks back before the structure settles.

Anti-patterns

• Polishing prose before the argument and sources are settled
• Treating the AHR like a subfield journal — the contribution must reach historians of other fields
• Importing a social-science template (hypotheses, data section, robustness) onto a history article
• Skipping historiography — "no one has studied X" is not, by itself, a contribution

Output format

【Stage】significance / historiography / argument / sources / interpretation / structure / prose / citation / review / submit / revise
【Route to】ahr-<skill>
【Why】one line
【Then】the next skill after that

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — archives, databases, and Chicago-notes tooling
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — official AHR URLs behind every fact in this pack