The origins of the Conference Group for Central European History lie in the project to film German records that were captured during or seized after World War II. To oversee this project and to secure financial support, a group of American scholars organized the American Committee for the Study of War Documents in 1955. In 1957 the committee became part of the American Historical Association, which administered the funds that supported the filming. The committee then transformed itself into the Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association. It has since served as the principal organization of Central European historians in North America. Its journal was initially the Journal of Central European Affairs, which S. Harrison Thomson had edited at the University of Colorado for some years. In 1968 the journal was renamed Central European History as it resettled at Emory University, where Douglas Unfug became editor for the next twenty-two years. From 1990 to 2004 Kenneth Barkin of the University of California at Riverside served as the journal’s editor. He was succeeded by Kenneth Ledford of Case Western Reserve University. In 2006 Cambridge University Press became the journal’s publisher.
The Conference Group for Central European History now counts hundreds of individual and institutional members. The range of its activities has likewise grown. Its journal is the leading North American forum for scholarship on Central European history. The organization now sponsors multiple sessions at each annual meeting of the American Historical Association. In addition, it offers the Hans Rosenberg Book Prize annually to the best English-language monograph in Central European History. The Conference Group also monitors affairs in German and North American archives and maintains ties to the German Studies Association, the Society for Habsburg and Austrian History, and the German Historical Institute in Washington, as well as to the Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington, of which it was a founding member.