Thanks to the generous labors of the guest editors and authors of two special-topics issues (May and November 2002), we are able to feature four articles in this “open” issue of the journal that remind us (as did those) not only of the wealth of scholarship in the field of theatre research but of the seemingly chance confluence of ideas that often marks research. The archive I discussed in my first editorial (November 2001) has been well represented in these three issues, but also the imagination that lifts archival work to the living stage where history is enacted. The present issuewith its substantial references to theatre in the Americas, to theatre and national identity, to theatre in times of disaster and censorship, of prejudice and resistanceunderscores the relationship between research and its construction in scholarship, and between scholarship and civic life.