MRZine: Academia and Social Change
Academia and Social Change
by Matthew Richman
The American Historical Association (AHA) is the most prominent professional organization for American historians. Its annual meeting, held recently in Atlanta, featured abstruse panels and presentations with titles such as “Disciplined Bodies and the Production of Space, Place, and Race: Atlanta’s Latino Day Laborers at the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century” and “The Desire for Modernity: Masculinity, Mexican Migration, and the Dynamics of U.S. National Belonging.” If academic work like this bears no relationship to concrete political realities, a group called Historians Against the War (HAW) injected some activism into the conference. Formed several months after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, HAW opposes “the expansion of United States empire and the doctrine of pre-emptive war that have led to the occupation of Iraq.” HAW proposed a resolution against the Iraq war, which passed after an hour of debate. The resolution enumerated the measures taken by the administration which are inimical to historians or historically-minded people, such as “condemning as ‘revisionism’ the search for truth about pre-war intelligence” and “re-classifying previously unclassified government documents.” With the passage of the statement, the AHA effectively endorsed its conclusions: that members of the AHA should “. . . take a public stand as citizens on behalf of the values necessary to the practice of our profession; and . . . do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion.” The success of the resolution means that the AHA is, for the first time in its 123 year history, taking an anti-war stance. In 1969, a previous resolution, supported by some of the same historians as the 2007 one, was defeated.
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