The mission of Historians for Peace and Democracy (H-PAD) is to stand up for peace and diplomacy internationally, and for democracy and human rights at home. To these ends, we are dedicated to fostering education on campuses and in communities, encouraging activism, and facilitating networking with organizations working for peace and justice.
Our History
Historians for Peace and Democracy began in 2003 under the name of Historians Against the War (HAW). Its focus at the outset was on halting the George W. Bush administration’s march to war in Iraq. After the March 2003 invasion, HAW set its primary goals as ending the US occupation of Iraq and protecting civil liberties at home.
Over the next decade and a half, HAW broadened its focus to include other foreign policy issues as well as Iraq. It held national conferences in 2006 (at the University of Texas at Austin), 2008 (Georgia State University, Atlanta), and 2013 (Towson University, Baltimore). A highlight was passage by the American Historical Association in 2007 of a resolution sponsored by HAW calling for an end to the Iraq War. It was approved by a 3-1 margin in a referendum of AHA members. For a fuller account of HAW’s work during those years see Historical Notes on Historians Against the War by Jim O’Brien (May 2017).
In April 2017, at the outset of the Donald Trump administration, the HAW Steering Committee proposed – and members approved in an email vote – a new policy statement. It announced that HAW would seek to integrate our work against the dangers of war abroad with threats to democracy at home by defending civil liberties for all, countering “alternative facts,” and challenging triumphalist militarism in all aspects. A newly elected Steering Committee met on June 6, 2017 and voted to change our name to Historians for Peace and Democracy (H-PAD).
Since 2017 H-PAD members have increased their presence at the American Historical Association’s annual meetings. Every January since 2018 (with the exception of 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic) H-PAD has run a “mini-conference” focused on radical and anti-war themes within the larger conference. At the 2024 convention in San Francisco we sponsored 17 sessions with total participation of close to 600. In addition, a resolution submitted by H-PAD, “In Defense of the Right to Learn,” responding to right-wing attacks on history education, was passed by AHA members on hand for the organization’s annual business meeting.
Countering the “culture wars” has been another major focus of the last few years. H-PAD joined (when?) in the effort of the African American Policy Forum to encourage faculty senates to pass resolutions defending academic freedom against the emerging threats. More recently, H-PAD has created, and maintains, an archive tracking the “Culture Wars against Education”, and has joined with other groups to form Historians on Call, a network of historians working to support teachers under attack for teaching critical but honest US history. An H-PAD working group has also been working to end unconditional US support for the cruel, arguably genocidal military campaign waged by Israel in Gaza in response to the savage attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
2017 POLICY STATEMENT:
Historians Against the War was formed in January 2003 to oppose the Bush Administration’s drive for a pre-emptive, illegal invasion of Iraq. We participated actively in the antiwar movement of the Bush years, and we continued to challenge U.S. foreign policy and extended support for Palestinian human rights in the Obama era. Now, with the ascent of an extreme right wing administration contemptuous of constitutional norms, we have a new mission: to stand up for peace and diplomacy internationally, and democracy and human rights at home. Our work, as historians against war and for peace and democracy, will have two focuses. First, we see our campuses as key sites for both repression and resistance. We will fight for the right to education, free speech and academic freedom for all members of campus communities, and for the human and civil rights of our students, especially the undocumented, Muslims, people of color, women and LGBTQ people. Second, we will join the organized resistance to Donald Trump’s regime by mobilizing historians, teachers, and historically-minded activists to challenge the permanent campaign of “fake news” and phony history that has driven the right’s ascent. We will defend the discipline of history against attempts to reduce it to simple affirmations of “American greatness,” and document how prior eras of reaction and repression were successfully combated. We recognize that the Trump/Pence Administration is a threat not only to the people of the United States, but to the people of the world, and we will stand against a new nuclear arms race, more imperial interventions, and collaboration with authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia.
Last Updated: June 2024
Marc Becker teaches Latin American history at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, with a special interest in Indigenous and peasant movements in 20th-century Ecuador. Among his books is Contemporary Latin American Revolutions (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). He has been active in H-PAD since its founding as Historians Against the War (HAW) in 2003, and was co-chair of HAW from 2008 to 2017. He has managed the organization’s website throughout.
Mara Dodge teaches US history at Westfield State University in Massachusetts, where she is active in the statewide teachers union and editor of the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, published by Westfield State. Her political activism began with Central America solidarity and South Africa anti-apartheid work in the 1980s, and she has served on the H-PAD Steering Committee since 2017.
Carolyn “Rusti” Eisenberg is a historian of US foreign relations who teaches at Hofstra University. Her most recent book Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia (Oxford U. Press, 2003), won the prestigious Bancroft Prize of the Organization of American Historians. She has been on the Steering Committee of HAW / H-PAD since 2004, serving as the legislative coordinator, and is a co-founder Brooklyn for Peace.
Van Gosse teaches US history at Franklin and Marshall University, specializing in 19th- and 20th-century social movements. His most recent book is The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (U. of North Carolina Press, 2021). A former staff member of the national organization Peace Action, he was a founding co-chair of Historians Against the War in 2003 and has been a co-chair of the H-PAD Steering Committee since 2017.
Mary (Molly) Nolan is a professor emerita of European and transatlantic history at New York University and a longtime activist in Brooklyn for Peace and other groups. In H-PAD, where she has been a Steering Committee member since 2018, she maintains the Culture Wars Archive of articles on right-wing attacks on education and on resistance to those attacks.
Jim O’Brien is a freelance editor and indexer and former part-time teacher at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He was co-chair of the HAW Steering Committee from 2007 to 2017. Since 2009, he has sent messages every few weeks to the HAW / H-PAD email list with links to “recent articles of interest” that offer historical perspectives on issues important to the organization.
Prasannan Parthasarathi is Professor of South Asian History at Boston College. He is a longtime activist for peace and justice and has been on the HPAD steering committee since 2023. He also serves on the board of Massachusetts Peace Action. He is writing a book on environment, agriculture and labor in nineteenth-century South India.
Margaret Power is a professor emerita of Latin American and women’s history at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Her most recent book is a history of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Solidarity Across the Americas (U. of North Carolina Press, 2023). She has been a leading figure in HAW since 2003 and co-chair of the H-PAD Steering Committee since 2017.
Ellen Schrecker is a professor emerita of history at Yeshiva University and a well-known historian both of McCarthyism and of higher education in the US, most recently in The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (U. of Chicago Press, 2021). As a member of the H-PAD Steering Committee since 2017, her principal focus is on threats to academic freedom and to the freedom to learn. She co-edited (with Valerie C. Johnson and Jennifer Ruth) The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom (Beacon Press, 2024).
Kevin Young teaches Latin American history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has also written widely on power dynamics in US society. His book Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won came out in May 2024 from PMN Press. He has served on the H-PAD Steering Committee since 2017, with special interest in using new media forms such as podcasts and videos to reach younger audiences.