The Texas State Historical Association is pleased to present the first 100 volumes of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, the oldest continuously published (since 1897) scholarly journal in Texas. This service will remain online free for an extended period, but will eventually become a benefit of membership in the Texas State Historical Association. You may also purchase individual issues through the University of Texas Press.

About the Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online

The Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online consists of more than 57,000 images of the pages of the first 100 years of the Quarterly as well as volume tables of contents and volume indices. The process of publishing the Quarterly Online involved locating printed copies of the 100 Volumes presented, unbinding them, scanning the 57,000 pages with a high resolution scanner, generating text via Optical Character Recognition or "OCR" software, encapsulating the document structure and text in approximately 2500 XML files used to produce the Tables of Contents and Indices, and compressing the 25MB page image files.

A Note on Quality: Any large-scale digitization project is susceptible to a variety of quality issues. For instance, an OCR error rate of 0.5-1% is generally considered acceptable if not good, and the error rate increases for smaller fonts such as in the Indices; we believe the Quarterly OCR error rate is for the most part acceptable (with a few notable exceptions). Occasionally a page image was missing, likely from the set of printed Volumes provided for digitization. The image compression software used to reduce the page image file sizes (originally about 1.5 Terabytes total) in some cases yielded far less than optimal image quality vs. size reduction. And the printed copies themselves are subject to publication errors; in one instance, we cannot show conclusively that two missing pages were ever actually published, and the context precludes us from inferring that they ever even existed and were not, in fact, a page-numbering error. The format and layout twice changed significantly during the 100 years represented, most notably the Index which started as a single-column layout, changed to 2-column for Volume 3 and then back to single-column for 4, changed to 2-column permanently at Volume 13, and to a 3-column layout at Volume 44. For all of these reasons and more, we recommend that you consult a printed version of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly if you require authoritative references.

About the Southwestern Historical Quarterly

The Southwestern Historical Quarterly brings the latest and most authoritative research in Texas history to a wide audience of history lovers and scholars. Since the Quarterly can only publish approximately sixteen articles each year, it is our editorial policy to publish original research on Texas history topics that have the greatest historical significance and the broadest reader interest.

About the Texas State Historical Association

The Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online is hosted and maintained by the Texas State Historical Association. Founded as a private, nonprofit educational organization in 1897, the Texas State Historical Association has long been regarded as one of the nation’s most dynamic regional history organizations. Reinforced by more than one hundred years of scholarship and educational programs, its mission is to further the appreciation, understanding, and teaching of the rich and unique history of Texas through research, writing, and publication of relevant historical material.