LSU Libraries has digitized the early years of the academic journal 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, making them available online for the first time in the journal’s publication history.

1650-1850 publishes scholarly studies and book reviews concerning the “long” eighteenth century: in England, the period from the Interregnum and the Restoration through the early Romantic period; throughout Europe, the period commonly designated as the Enlightenment. The journal began in the 1990s as part of an effort to understand the long process of modernization—to investigate and interpret the roughly two centuries between the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Victorian era that encompassed the transition to modernity. For 30 years, 1650-1850 has continued to fulfill its mission by publishing essays and book reviews on familiar, canonical writers and artists and on those less visible figures who support the large cultural mansion of the Enlightenment. Kevin Cope, Robert and Rita Wetta Adams Professor in LSU’s Department of English, edits the journal.

“The LSU Scholarly Repository’s purpose is to make LSU scholarship more discoverable and accessible to the widest audience possible,” said Trent Dunkin, LSU Libraries’ institutional repository librarian. “Now that 1650-1850 is in the LSU Scholarly Repository, researchers are finding it with Google Scholar and through other discovery methods. Scholars all over the world have downloaded articles from the journal.”

Volumes 1 (1994) through 23 (2016), comprising 437 articles, are now freely available through the LSU Scholarly Repository and have already been downloaded more than 11,000 times.