H-PAD Panel at the 2019 American Historical Association
“Two More Years of Trump: What Is to Be Done?”
Friday, January 4, 10:30 am to 12:00, at the Hilton Chicago
Podcasts of the presentations and the discussion

The H-PAD panel at the AHA attracted about 50 attendees, who responded actively; by general accounts, the event was quite successful. Our purpose for the panel was explicitly political: to bring leading left historians together to discuss, drawing on their scholarship, the character of the current crisis and the roles that we as radical historians and intellectuals can—indeed must—play. Here is the publicity we put out for the panel:

“We are living in dangerous times! We as historians have a role to play in resisting attacks against Blacks, Latinos, women, the LGBTQ community, workers, and foreign nations and peoples targeted by the Trump regime. We historians must seek ways to work in solidarity with those forces leading the fight to expand democracy, social justice, and economic equality in the United States and around the world.”

The presentations on the panel were, in order of appearance:

  • Introduction by Van Goss and Margaret Power, H-PAD Co-Chairs.
  • Daniel Bessner, University of Washington, whose work focuses on what a left foreign policy would look like.
  • Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago, who specializes in modern Korean history
  • Nancy MacLean, Duke University, the author of Democracy in Chains, among other books.
  • Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.
  • Barbara Ransby, University of Illinois in Chicago, who recently authored Making All Black Lives Matter.
  • Barbara Weinstein, New York University, past AHA president and expert on Brazil and the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro.
  • Discussion by whole group

Here are links to downloadable podcasts of all of the above presentations, with running times on each:

Introduction (5:30)

Bessner (4:45)

Cumings (8:20)

Khalidi (7:30) (coming soon)

MacLean (9:30)

Ransby (8:45) (coming soon)

Weinstein (10:30)

Discussion (27:30)