Submission guidelines

The lodge seeks original work on Masonic history, symbolism, biography, material culture, and the documentary record — with a natural but not exclusive interest in New Hampshire and New England. The test is not the size of the subject but the quality of the evidence and the clarity of the argument.

A submission may take one of four forms, chosen when you begin in the portal:

Every factual claim should rest on a source a reader can follow. Cite as you write — author, title, and page — and distinguish what the evidence shows from what you infer. Where you are speculating, say so; honest doubt strengthens a paper rather than weakening it.

The proposed house citation style is Chicago notes-bibliography, which suits historical work with archival sources. The lodge's own records and others' published catalogue entries already carry suggested citations you can model.

Submit prose in DOCX or PDF; the portal versions each upload privately, so you can revise without losing the history of a draft. Keep formatting plain — the typesetting is the lodge's to do.

Images and scans are welcome where they carry the argument, but you are responsible for the right to reproduce them. Supply a caption and a source for each, and hold the permission on file; the lodge cannot publish an image whose rights are unclear.

Offer work that is your own and not already published elsewhere, unless you tell the editor plainly and hold the right to republish it. The submission wizard asks you to attest to originality, and — because publishing is impossible without it — to grant the lodge a licence to publish the accepted work.

The exact terms of that licence are part of the lodge's rights policy, which is provisional pending the lodge's ruling. The settled position will be published on the rights page before anything is published under it.

Submit through the Reading Room: the composer takes you through category, title and abstract, your file, and a final review. Once submitted, the paper enters the lodge's review process — triage by the editor, reading by one or more reviewers, and a decision, with revisions where the work warrants them.

You can follow your submission's progress in your own portal; every step is recorded and visible to you. The peer-review policy describes how that reading is conducted and what the possible outcomes are.