What Is the Role of the Historian?

The annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) is rarely an occasion that sparks intense controversy, but this year’s gathering of historians proved to be an exception. At the business meeting on January 6, 2025, AHA members overwhelmingly passed (428 to 88) a resolution condemning Israel’s “scholasticide” — i.e., intentional decimation of educational and archival infrastructure — in Gaza. Given the lopsided nature of the vote, it then came as a shock to many AHA members and observers that the 16-member AHA Council subsequently decided to veto the resolution, declaring that it was beyond the scope of the association’s mission. Aside from a widespread sense of dismay, this ongoing dispute has prompted many of us to consider whether it is appropriate for our learned society to take a position on “political” issues. Or to put it more broadly, what is the role of history, the historian, and the principal U.S. organization that represents them?

This is not the first time this question has arisen for the AHA. During the Vietnam War, there were repeated attempts, all of them unsuccessful, to pass resolutions condemning U.S. involvement in that conflict. These failures may explain why there were no significant attempts by AHA members to prod the association to take stands on matters that were not exclusively of an academic nature during the rest of the 20th century. In the 1990s, the AHA judged it to be within its purview to investigate allegations of academic dishonesty, though it abandoned the initiative a few years later because it was resource-intensive and exposed the association to legal reprisals. In contrast, the Iran-Contra Affair a decade earlier — a scandal that reflected numerous distortions of historical fact and interpretation — passed unremarked upon by the leading U.S.-based historical association, as did the 1994 massacre in Rwanda, also fueled by specious historical claims.

Things began to change in the early 2000s in response to a series of policies adopted by the George W. Bush administration and the newly-created Department of Homeland Security. Massive re-classification orders threatened to deprive historians of access to crucial archival sources. The denial of visas to anyone, historians included, who could by some extreme stretch of the imagination be categorized as a threat to national security, impeded the movement of scholars who had been offered academic positions or invited to speak at conferences in the U.S., precisely at a time when the discipline of history was becoming more and more transnational. These problems escalated with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the broader “War on Terror.” 

Opposition to these hindrances culminated in the passage of a 2007 AHA resolution denouncing “US Government Practices Inimical to the Values of the Historical Profession,” which focused on the War on Terror’s negative impact on historians. Underlying the careful wording of the resolution was a widespread opposition to the invasion of Iraq among AHA members — certainly the factor that explains the lopsided vote (1,550 to 498) in favor of the resolution. In a similar vein, the AHA Council issued a statement in 2022 vigorously denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the historical mythology purveyed by Putin to justify the invasion. Once again, the denunciation included a nod to historical issues, but anyone reading the text of the statement could easily conclude that the main motivation was not Putin’s spurious historical interpretations, but a sense of urgency and generalized outrage at the incursion into Ukraine. 

Then there is the resolution passed at the 2025 AHA meeting condemning “scholasticide” in Gaza. Once again, the authors of the resolution — AHA members affiliated with Historians for Peace and Democracy — went to great pains to focus on the destruction of archives, libraries, and university campuses, as well as the deaths of more than 95 university professors and hundreds of teachers. There is no reference in the text of the resolution to genocide; there is no call for a boycott of Israel or Israeli institutions. Even the issue of “intent” is left somewhat ambiguous, being mentioned only in a quote from a statement by UN experts. What is stated as a matter of fact is only what can be considered beyond dispute: that the IDF’s campaign in Gaza has obliterated all 12 universities in the territory and led to the deaths of hundreds of teachers and professors, not to mention thousands of young students. Indeed, the authors of the resolution assumed that its publication in the monthly AHA bulletin prior to the meeting indicated that its content met the existing standards, making the subsequent council veto all the more disturbing. 

The wording of these resolutions could be chalked up to expediency: in order to be published in the AHA monthly magazine, Perspectives on History, and presented for a vote at the annual business meeting, a resolution has to coincide with the concerns and objectives of the historical profession as defined, if rather vaguely, by the AHA. Anyone seeking to engage in “advocacy” through the association has had to acquiesce to those real, if ill-defined, boundaries, by prioritizing the implications for historical research and education, rather than (in the case of Gaza) the deaths of many thousands of small children. What we’ve seen over the last 18 years is not a rejection of those boundaries, but rather an attempt to re-define them less narrowly and more capaciously. Far from demanding that the AHA remove all guardrails, most historians inclined toward activism have tacitly accepted the assumption that there should be some limits on what controversies the AHA wades into, or at least on how it wades into them. 

This gradualist approach to rethinking the limits of the AHA’s engagement in advocacy is quite remarkable given that any survey of early- to mid-career historians and doctoral students in leading North American history departments in 2025 would almost surely reveal that most scholars in these cohorts were drawn to the study of history by concerns they would describe as “political.” Of course, this is not to imply that earlier generations of AHA members were apolitical — it is, after all, a learned society whose presidents include actual presidents (Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson), as well as public figures like Alfred Thayer Mahan, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Arthur Schlesinger Sr. But a very restricted definition of politics and a broader faith in the revelations to be found in archival sources allowed previous generations of scholars (roughly, prior to the 1960s) to maintain the notion, or better, the fiction, that their political engagements did not taint or color their historical writings. 

In certain respects, this sensibility has persisted within the AHA even as its membership has become more inclined to see political concerns as inseparable from historical inquiry. Yet I don’t think this persistence can be attributed exclusively to “tradition.” A quick glance at AHA conference programs from over the years will illustrate how much the subjects of historical inquiry have changed and diversified — though historians of Palestine would argue that this has been more apparent in some areas than others. The fact that I am writing this as a past president of the AHA is evidence that another longstanding tradition — the dominance of white men in AHA leadership who study the U.S. and Europe— has significantly eroded. As with academia overall, this shift has been more substantial with regard to gender diversity, but gradually the leadership has also become more diverse in other ways. Had the members attending this year’s business meeting not been so distracted (and understandably so) by the resolution condemning scholasticide in Gaza, they might have paid closer attention to a moment that was definitely “historic” for the AHA: not only was Thavolia Glymph, the first Black woman to be president of the association, completing her term at the meeting, but she was passing the presidential gavel (the historian’s version of “the torch”) to Ben Vinson, a historian of colonial Latin America and president of Howard University. It was the first time in the AHA’s 140-year history that one person of African descent was succeeding another of African descent as president. 

The AHA is not an organization frozen in time or forever clinging to the past; it has accompanied and adapted to the changes in the historical profession over the last half century. Even though the Radical Historians’ Caucus’ effort to elect Staughton Lynd president and pass a resolution condemning the Vietnam War went down to defeat in 1969, that turbulent episode convinced the organization’s leadership that steps had to be taken to expand and diversify the AHA Council, and maybe inject some variation into the nearly unbroken chain of white males who had occupied the presidency since the AHA’s founding. (It took another 10 years for an African American to be elected president, and a whopping 18 years until a woman occupied that position.) But the AHA has rarely, if ever, been in the vanguard of those changes. This may be a reflection of longstanding traditions, but also of the logic of long-established institutions. As one would expect, the AHA seeks to be as inclusive as possible, and once an organization starts taking explicitly political stands, or moves to the cutting edge, there are bound to be members with a different intellectual and/or political orientation who no longer feel like they “belong.” And while the AHA is a membership society and its fiscal health depends primarily on membership dues and annual meeting participation, it also receives donations and grants from foundations and government agencies — sources of revenue that might be imperiled by taking explicit stances on issues deemed controversial by the leadership or its external supporters. 

The cautious posture adopted by the AHA with regard to political issues was far less of a problem when the majority of its members could maintain the fiction of a sharp separation between their positions in the world and their intellectual pursuits, and remain untroubled by the succession of white males at elite universities who led the association. But that caution has persisted into an era when few historians would dissociate their scholarly work from their political commitments. I should emphasize here that I mean “political” with a small “p,” implying a broader meaning of the political, one that has allowed historians to expand their notion of the public sphere(s) and their definition of political actors and intellectual authorities. And these interpretive trends could only be possible in an atmosphere where critical innovation is encouraged, not suppressed, where scholars have regular access to archives and libraries, and classroom conversations can take place without fear of retribution or military incursion. 

During my tenure as AHA president, I devoted a column in Perspectives to criticizing an article by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus lauding the recently deceased Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. as a towering figure whose ideas sparked the imaginations of prominent politicians, a claim with which I had no quarrel. What I did object to was the flipside of this praise: his lament that today’s historians had somehow become “smaller” and less capable of connecting to our nation’s political movers and shakers. On the face of it, Tanenhaus was complaining that historians were producing scholarship that was not politically relevant enough, though in his case it was politics with a capital “P.” My response (the abridged version — it was an extended rant) was to question the value he attributed to capturing politicians’ imaginations. Historians perform a more important service by challenging commonplace assumptions and hierarchies of knowledge and power. Works that appeal to the privileged and powerful tend to be precisely those that condense and confirm their ways of seeing the world. To some extent, my response to Tanenhaus could serve as my answer to the question, “What do I see as the role of the historian?” For me, the historian should be, above all, a disrupter, by which I mean a scholar who contests conventional ways of viewing the past and the past’s relationship to the present. Historians should make it more difficult for students or the larger public to naturalize inequalities of wealth and privilege, or romanticize the poor and oppressed, who, depending on the circumstances, could become the oppressors — these, alas, are not fixed categories. The “disruption” I have in mind is not exclusively a challenge to those on the opposite end of the political spectrum; my dissertation and first book was, in large part, a critique of dependency theory, an analytical framework associated with left-wing historians and political economists, but one that I regarded as both effacing human agency and relegating less wealthy regions of the world to the historiographical periphery. 

There are other perfectly legitimate motives for becoming a historian, and other valid ways of approaching historical questions, but this is my vision of the most meaningful role historians can play in their teaching and scholarship, and I tend to be most attracted to historical work whose authors share that perspective. The way I view the role of the historian also means that I will keep nudging the AHA to move toward a broader definition of issues relevant to the historical profession, to acknowledge that some issues that may be “divisive” still need to be addressed, and to refuse the impulse toward “anticipatory compliance” that threatens to make academic freedom an anachronism. At a moment like this, eschewing political controversy could prove to be the most divisive position of all.