Historians Against the War Conference

Last weekend, the Universtity of Texas - Austin hosted a summit entitled "Empire, Resistance, and the War in Iraq: A Conference for Historians and Activists." I had hoped to attend this conference back when my financial, professional, and academic life was in better shape. Unfortunately, the same forces that kept me from crafting my second post here for six days also kept me from participating in this important event. The conference was put on by Historians Against the War (HAW), an ad hoc group started in 2003 by members of the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization (MARHO), publishers of the Radical History Review. You can view the founding statement of Historians Against the War online here, and you can see the list of signatories (including yours truly) here.

While I didn't attend the conference, I did follow it closely, and since I haven't seen it mentioned on the websites of any other historians I think it's important to bring attention to it here. The keynote speakers were Howard Zinn and Andrea Smith, and they were followed by an impressive list of scholars and activists who spoke on a wide range of topics. The schedule of events, which includes numerous photos as well as the full texts of many presentations, is online here. I have not had time to review every paper, but several stand out as particularly worthy of mention here. Non-academics in particular will benefit from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's provocative introduction to the history of U.S. imperialism, which replaces the liberal mythology of a democracy hijacked by neocons circa 09/11/2001 with an honest historical analysis of American foreign policy in the long durée.

For those who don't mind reading the language of the Ivory Tower, an excellent example of the interdisciplinary scholarship that was on display at the conference is "Toward a Sociology of Foreign Policy" by Joe Conti and John Foran of UC Santa Barbara. This paper calls for "conceptual tools that draw on a variety of disciplines and perspectives, capable of identifying the range of structural factors at work – from global political economy to the environment, the militarization of foreign policy, the geo-politics of social control, and the domestic side of foreign policy." It draws on a range of academic traditions including racial formation theory, cultural Marxism, and peak oil analysis to provide a useful starting point for the new subfield they propose.

Finally, teachers of history at all levels will benefit from reading "No Good Wars: Teaching the History of Modern American Wars as a Means of Resisting Current Ones" by Kenneth Long of St. Joseph College. This excellent piece is accessible to all audiences and includes a syllabus that should be particularly valuable to University faculty, graduate students, and high school teachers struggling to develop courses and teaching methods that deal with these important issues. I'll return to a discussion of this paper and its implications in a few days in a dedicated post.

A summary of these and other presentations, available online here, was compiled in advance of the summit by Jim O'Brien of The Nation and is still useful. An entertainingly awful piece in the UT campus paper is online here. The article (without tongue in cheek) discusses empiricism and misquotes speakers on the ways in which the U.S. is behaving "like all the empirical powers of the past." The best and most comprehensive coverage of the conference was published by Judy Atkins in Portside, an e-journal I came across by way of my friend Suzanne Moulton in the history office back at the University of Maine. The article, "Historians against the War Sponsors Unique Academic Conference", is an excellent account of the weekend that covers far more than I could hope to do in this short post (and from a participant).

The conference on the whole appears to have been a success. Like so many events at this stage of antiwar mobilization, it has no measurable direct impact, but it clearly represents another step forward in the development of a culture of resistance. Historians can choose to play a number of important roles in the antiwar struggle, and I hope that this conference can help us to engage the past with the present in increasingly concrete and meaningful ways.

[Above: Historian Howard Zinn delivers the keynote at the Historians Against the War conference.]