The peer-reviewed scientific journal Historická demografie was founded in 1967 following the development of historical demographic research in the then Czechoslovakia, which was mainly based on the theoretical and methodological foundations of West European historical demography. The journal was initially issued only once a year. Publication of the journal was interrupted in 1975–1984 for political and ideological reasons. The journal was issued until 1991 by the Institute of History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (or by its predecessors), and later by the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The papers submitted to the editorial office have been thoroughly peer-reviewed since 2007. In 2009, the journal was included in the portfolio of the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and began to be issued twice a year. Since 2015, the journal has been published in cooperation of the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University in Prague. V letech 2015–2022 časopis vycházel ve spolupráci Etnologického ústavu a Fakulty humanitních studií Univerzity Karlovy.

The journal always was open towards new theories and methods and inclined to interpretatively oriented disciplines. Most of the papers are published in Czech, but the proportion of foreign languages and authors on the pages of Historická demografie always distinctly surpassed usual standards of other humanities periodicals published in our country. In the 1980s and 1990s, the texts in Historická demografie brought to the Czech Republic paradigmatic impulses of anthropological family studies or the whole historical-anthropological discourse.