A Proactive and Public Fight

I decided to become a historian in second grade. By middle school, I settled on my field, which I studied throughout college and graduate school: the history of World War II and the Holocaust. Thanks to my excellent teachers, my public schools’ extensive libraries, and my parents’ support of me reading and querying them about challenging historical topics, I felt an imperative, even as a child, to share the stories of the millions murdered in the Holocaust, to understand how a whole world could go to war, and to appreciate the strength of those who fought against and resisted fascism. Yet today, there are those who would have denied me—and seek now to deny my children—the opportunity to learn about our nation’s history. My personal history steels my resolve to fight for the discipline through the AHA’s federal advocacy and policy initiatives.

Our current advocacy has coalesced around one central and alarming theme: efforts to restrict history education. The opening salvo was the 1776 Commission report in 2021; then, state legislators introduced and promoted legislation to restrict the teaching of “divisive concepts,” along with ending tenure, curbing academic freedom, and sanitizing social studies curricula. Attacks on history and higher education have since broadened to the federal level, heightened by the current administration’s executive orders and new efforts to codify them into federal policy.

Even before the 2024 election, AHA leadership had decided to expand our federal advocacy efforts, but the new administration led us to ramp up our work much more quickly and substantially than planned. Our state-level work gave a crucial advantage: We had seen this playbook before. We know who the major players are. We know what their model legislation looks like, having worked to combat its spread at the state level, and we know what messaging is often most persuasive with different audiences.

But this knowledge can take us only so far. We have, by necessity, been in defense mode, responding to executive orders or federal actions that impact history and historians. We’ve tailored our responses to each, in some cases writing statements or letters, developing advocacy guides, and issuing action alerts. In other cases, we have met with congressional staff or historians at federal agencies and worked with partner organizations to coordinate our responses. Much of this work has, by necessity, been behind the scenes. But we are now moving into a more proactive and public mode to fight for history.

We earned important wins in the past year. We worked with congressional offices to resurrect the Congressional History Caucus. We developed strong relationships with other organizations and new allies, united by our support for history, the independence of federal agencies, and the rule of law. Our lawsuit to restore the National Endowment for the Humanities helped expose the appalling ChatGPT-fueled process by which the Department of Government Efficiency illegally terminated history and humanities grants. And in April, in collaboration with American Oversight, we filed a second lawsuit that seeks to ensure enforcement of the Presidential Records Act.

Despite these wins, our advocacy work continues to be immense (see Advocacy Briefs on pages 15–18). Advocating on behalf of the historical discipline is a heavy responsibility—one that AHA staff undertake with the utmost seriousness and respect each day. Our goal, above all else, is to support our members and colleagues who are affected by restrictive state legislation or federal actions.

But my tiny, personal goal? It’s to help that second-grade student who might walk into her school library, pick up a history book, and want to learn more. That’s the person I hold in my mind when all the advocacy work threatens to overwhelm: the child who, if we don’t fight for her freedom to learn, may never find her passion for history.