AHA executive director James Grossman, David W. Blight (Yale Univ. and president, Organization of American Historians), and Organization of American Historians executive director Beth English co-authored an article for The New Republic, “Trump May Wish to Abolish the Past. We Historians Will Not.” They write that the recently issued executive order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling,“ is an attempt to undermine [historians’] authority in the interest of a manufactured national unity. It violates every instinct, every principle, indeed nearly every method of research and thinking that historians have practiced for at least a century.” Furthermore, “[i]ntended to instill fear in teachers, this order itself ironically seems driven by fear, by a refusal to acknowledge the diversity of our nation and the wounds that cannot be healed until they are understood.”
