Essay: early American genetics journals.

Before the Second World War, there were only two North-American journals exclusively devoted to genetics - the Journal of Heredity and Genetics. In the late 1940s, Genetics spawned two progeny - the American Journal of Human Genetics and Evolution. This article recounts the early days of these journals, their influential and often colourful founding editors, and their contents. It emphasizes the contrast between those years, when a reader had a realistic chance of keeping up with the whole field, and the current plethora of journals that makes it impossible to keep up with even the tables of contents.