More Than 1,000 Historians Announce National Antiwar Network

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 22, 2003

Contact: Van Gosse (717) 291-4246
David Montgomery (203) 865-6480

More Than 1,000 Historians Announce National Antiwar Network

Chicago-At a meeting on the evening of Friday, January 3, at the 117th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, historians from more than forty colleges and universities agreed to form a new national network, "Historians Against the War." A committee was appointed to draft the following statement, which has been circulated for other historians to sign.

We historians call for a halt to the march towards war against Iraq. We are deeply concerned about the needless destruction of human life, the undermining of constitutional government in the U.S., the egregious curtailment of civil liberties and human rights at home and abroad, and the obstruction of world peace for the indefinite future.

Since that meeting, more than one thousand historians, from 250 colleges and universities in 47 states, have endorsed the HAW statement.

Immediate projects for Historians Against the War include creating a nationwide "virtual speakers bureau" to aid the growing antiwar movement, providing accurate scholarly rebuttals to the mendacious historical distortions of the Bush Administration, and reporting on the growing wave of campus activism.

Participants in the meeting and signers of the statement include many of the United States' leading historians, from Harvard, Yale, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, the University of North Carolina, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, and UCLA.

Professor Emeritus at Yale University, David Montgomery, a spokesman for Historians Against the War, notes that "What is most noteworthy to me about the signers of the statement is that they represent a very broad cross section of political opinion and styles of historical writing. Long-time activists, people who have done little for decades, and many others who have never been involved can be found among the signers."

A complete list of signers of the Historians Against the War statement is available on this website. (Coverage of the founding meeting is available on the History New Network website at http://hnn.us/articles/1200.html.)