Dear Friends of HAW/Historians for Peace and Democracy,

We are writing you because you were once a member of Historians Against the War (HAW) or signed a HAW petition. We want to let you know about some changes we have undergone recently and our current campaign. We hope you will rejoin HAW and/or become active in our work. It is necessary for us to work together to resist the current reactionary politics of the Trump administration. As you may or may not be aware, HAW has undergone some changes recently. In April, we ratified a new policy statement to better address and oppose the perilous times we live in following Donald Trump et al’s ascension to power. We also elected a new steering committee (Marc Becker, Matt Bokovoy, Sandra Deutsch, Carolyn Eisenberg, Barbara Epstein, John J. Fitzgerald, Jeri Fogel, Martin Halpern, Tom Harbison, Jeremy Kuzmarov, Staughton Lynd, Jim O’Brien, Roger Peace, Ellen Schrecker, Andor Skotnes, James Swarts, Barbara Weinstein, Max Weiss, Kevin Young) and named Van Gosse and Margaret Power as co-chairs. And, we changed our name to Historians for Peace and Democracy, H-PAD. We hope you are as excited with these changes as we are!

We are now launching a fall campaign of dialogue, “Threats to Democracy, Dangers of War.” Via roundtables, workshops, teach-ins, podcasts and more, we will engage students, faculty, and members of the broader community in discussions about the different forms of authoritarianism, anti-democratic governance, and racial injustice that we currently face, how they were countered in the past, and how we can resist them today. To facilitate and maximize the campaign, we have developed a very impressive list of endorsers and a Speakers’ Bureau of historians and public intellectuals, who are available for speaking engagements as part of this campaign.

We hope you will take part in it this work.

Here’s how you can get involved. First, we hope you join H-PAD. To do so, please sign the new membership form we have designed. And – good news — it should take under one minute to fill out. Please go to https://new.historiansforpeace.org/join-us/ to sign up. We have also designed a new web page, which you can access at https://new.historiansforpeace.org/. Most of all, we hope you become an active member of the ““Threats to Democracy, Dangers of War” campaign.

Here are some different ways you can become involved (go to the membership form at https://new.historiansforpeace.org/join-us/ to tell how you want to participate):

• a Teach-In with faculty/student/community participants addressing the range of issues
• a Roundtable addressing basic civil liberties and rights, with ACLU, law professors etc.
• hosting a live Streaming of citywide Teach-In with leading scholars and activists
• hosting a lecture by a historian or activist intellectual from our Speaker’s Bureau on one of the major issues connected to rights, repression, or militarism in U.S. history
• I’m in a major metropolitan area and want to help organize a citywide Teach-In:  put me in touch with other H-PAD members

We look forward to hearing from you. If you have any questions, please contact Margaret Power (power@iit.edu) or Van Gosse (mailto:vgosse@fandm.edu)

Van Gosse and Margaret Power

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Margaret Power
Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Humanities
Illinois Institute of Technology
3301 S. Dearborn St.
Room 218 Siegel Hall
Chicago, IL 60616
312-567-6921