About us
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
The seeds of HPAD were sown at the January 2003 annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, against the background of the George W. Bush administration’s drumbeat for war with Iraq. Two members of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective called a meeting where 83 people showed up, and David Montgomery wrote a founding statement for Historians Against the War (HAW), which rapidly gained hundreds of signatures. After the March 2003 invasion, HAW adopted a new statement calling for an end to the occupation of Iraq and protecting civil liberties at home. Over the course of 2003, more than 2,600 historians signed the petition and automatically became members of HAW.
Iraq remained the primary, though not exclusive, focus of HAW for its first few years. We issued pamphlets and broadsides, organized contingents at rallies and marches and both AHA and OAH meetings, and participated actively in United for Peace and Justice, the major antiwar coalition. In February 2006 we organized a national Iraq War conference at the University of Texas at Austin and then a teach-in campaign in the fall of that year, with events at more than forty campuses. In 2007 we pressed for the adoption by the American Historical Association of a resolution calling for an end to the Iraq War. The AHA resolution won a majority at the annual business meeting in January 2007 and then was approved by a 3-1 margin in a referendum of AHA members.
Two additional national HAW conferences were held in subsequent years – one in 2008 at Georgia State University in Atlanta and one in 2013 at Towson University outside Baltimore. In the meantime, extensive internal discussion led to an expanded mission statement calling for action in domestic as well as foreign-policy areas. A referendum vote of 196-14 adopted it for HAW in 2009. Still, the group’s name was unchanged and foreign affairs remained the main concern. In 2014, HAW voted to take up solidarity with Palestine as a focus, and the first Palestine-Israel Working Group formed. Resolutions offered at the 2015 and 2016 AHA conventions condemned restrictions on academic freedom in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. (Both were defeated in votes at the AHA business meetings.)
In April 2017, at the outset of the first Trump administration, the HAW Steering Committee proposed – and members approved in an email vote – a new policy statement calling for resistance to the new administration on all fronts. It announced that HAW would seek to integrate its 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 the name to Historians for Peace and Democracy (H-PAD).
Under the new name, H-PAD sought to stake out a critical response to repressive Trump administration policies in a way that did not glamorize the US past. Initiatives have included: ten “Broadsides for the Trump Era” on diverse topics with an easily reproduced format; short videos; “Historians on Call, an attempted network of historians working to support teachers under attack for teaching honest US history; and a massive “Culture Wars Archive,” collating resource materials on right-wing attacks on education, and efforts to resist them, through 2023.
Two features of HAW’s work before 2017 carried over and continue today: occasional alerts set to the email list by a legislative task force in H-PAD and a set of links to “recent articles of interest” sent to the email list every three or four weeks. H-PAD has also organized several online “webinars” in coordination with other groups. Panelists in 2024-25 included Nancy MacLean, Barbara Ransby, Robin D. G. Kelley, Barbara Weinstein, and Ellen Schrecker among others.
The most striking aspect of the newly defined organization’s work since 2017 has been a growing presence in the American Historical Association. Every January since 2018 (with the exception of 2021 due to the Covid pandemic) H-PAD has created a “mini-conference” within the annual AHA convention. By the time of the 2026 convention in Chicago, the number of sessions had grown to 21, on a great variety of topics from “Evaluating the Impact of the Obama Presidency” to “Gender and Right-Wing Politics: Historical Perspectives.
At the 2024 AHA convention H-PAD put forward a resolution, “In Defense of the Right to Learn,” responding to right-wing attacks on history education. With support from AHA’s Council, it passed with no opposition. Resolutions proposed at the next two AHA meetings were more controversial. They sought to respond to the ongoing US-supported Israeli destruction of Gaza by focusing on “scholasticide” against Palestinian schools and universities.
These resolutions passed in lopsided votes in the AHA business meeting each year – 428-88 in 2025 and 282-76 in 2026 – but in each case a majority of the AHA Council voted to exercise the Council’s veto power and kill the resolution outright rather than approving it or submitting it to a membership vote. The same fate befell a 2026 resolution on defending academic freedom, which denounced the weaponization of antisemitism and was approved in the business meeting by 245-62.
In response to the 2025 veto, H-PAD coordinated with two other organizations – Historians for Palestine and the Palestinian Historians Group – to endorse six candidates for AHA offices who pledged to support democratization of the AHA. Four of the six were elected in the 2025 balloting and similar endorsements are being planned for the 2026 AHA elections.
Besides working in the AHA, holding webinars, and issuing legislative alerts, H-PAD is working on developing accessible resources for students, teachers, and movement activists about the multiple crises in the MAGA world. We are working to build bridges between historians in colleges and universities and those in high schools. We cooperate on specific initiatives around academic freedom, free speech, and democracy with other organizations, such as the Coalition for Action in Higher Education.
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: February 2026
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.
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 is a professor emeritus at Franklin and Marshall College, where he taught Cold War and African American history. 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). He was Organizing Director of Peace Action in 1995-2000, and on the Steering Committee of United for Peace and Justice in 2003-2008. He helped found Historians Against the War in 2003 and has been co-chair of the HPAD Steering Committee since 2017.
Linda Gordon is from Portland, Oregon. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts/Boston, the University of Wisconsin/Madison, and at NYU, where she is University Professor of the Humanities. Many of her books won prestigious awards and prizes. Her most recent is Seven Social Movements that Changed America (Norton, 2025), which discusses the settlement house movement, the 1920s KKK, the depression-era campaign for Social Security, the 1930s unemployed movement, the Montgomery bus boycott, farmworkers’ union organizing drive, and socialist-feminism in the 1970s.
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 works with the Coalition For Action in Higher Education (CAHE). She has been an HPAD Steering Committee member since 2018, and maintained the Culture Wars Archive of articles on right-wing attacks on education and on resistance to those attacks from 2022-2024.
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.
Samantha Payne is a transnational historian of the nineteenth-century United States who teaches at the College of Charleston. She is currently working on a book titled Atlantic Reconstruction, which explores the transnational struggle over the boundaries of Black political citizenship in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States, the last three slaveholding societies in the hemisphere.
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.