RHR and H-PAD at 2023 AHA Annual Meeting

For the fifth time, Radical History Review, an affiliate organization of the American Historical Association, with the support of Historians for Peace and Democracy, held sessions at an AHA Annual Meeting. The 2023 meeting occurred in Philadelphia, January 5-8, 2023, at which we held 10 sessions:

1.      “Peace with Honor”: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords

2.      Fighting the Culture War Attack on History, Strategies & Experiences

3.      Unions in Higher Education: Historical & Contemporary Realities

4.      Empire of Sanctions

5.      The “Ed Scare”: The Current Conservative Panic over the Academy and Its Antecedents

6.      Radical Historians, Intellectuals, & Activists: Our Roles in the Current Situations

7.      Teaching the Truth in Secondary Schools during Contentious Times

8.      Topics in South African Cultural and Political History

9.      The Failed War on Terrorism: Afghanistan and Iraq

10.    International Solidarity with Palestinians – Palestinian Internationalist Solidarities.

Our sessions were well received, with an estimated total of 320 to 360 attending; two sessions attracted more than 60 people, most of the rest attracted between 30 and 40. The topics taken up by our sessions were diverse.  Three addressed education, including one on education labor, and one on teaching secondary school.  Five or 50% of our sessions focused on international issues or foreign policy. And, reflecting current H-PAD priorities, half of our session put strong emphasis on the culture wars.

For the first time this year, we recorded most of our sessions on audio and video, including sessions 1-5, 9, and 10.  At this point, a video recording is only available for session 10, but audio recordings are available for the others.  To download these recordings go to here. 

As in 2020, all our sessions were held in the same room, so we thereby pretty much became our space for the duration of the conference. We set up a literature and information table for both RHR and H-PAD that was available throughout much of the conference in the back of the room. We distributed a large amount of literature for both organizations there and had many useful conversations

We plan to again sponsor sessions at the next AHA meeting in San Francisco, January 4-8.  If you would like to organize a session for this conference, or if you would like to otherwise help our, please be in contact.

[For a full report of RHR/H-PAD at AHA2023 go here]

Update: Historians on Call

H-PAD, in cooperation with the Zinn Historical Project (ZHL), is organizing historians into a network called Historians on Call, to directly support educators in the schools who are under attack from right-wing forces over their teaching and curriculums. Go here for an update on ZHL’s website.  And join us!

Update: H-PAD Culture Wars Against Education Archive

The multifaceted culture wars against education constitute attacks on how history and social studies are taught and written.  H-PAD has compiled this archive of materials on the past and present of the culture wars and responses to them, which we hope will help teachers and students on all levels educate themselves about the current crisis and ways to respond to it. The archive provides a variety of resources useful as well for journalists, commentators, politicians, and the general public. Here is the link to the archive.