AHR Roundtable: The History Manifesto at 10

Organized by the AHA Research Division and the American Historical Review

In October 2024, The History Manifesto stirred controversy. Originally intended as a love-letter to the profession, it was denounced from Oxford and Northeastern, yet drew praise from Paris and Princeton. Its reorientation of historical conversations towards long-term, global, the environment, and digital methods anticipated and helped to guide trends across the profession broadly. Its advocacy of the relevance of history to the public sphere resonated with initiatives underway on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of its other prophecies – including the relative marginalization of gender and race – proved naïve. Other suggestions, for example the increasing importance of digital methods to History departments, have been unevenly embraced, with European departments cultivating digital methodologists while U.S. departments have largely neglected to hire for methods expertise. The pamphlet remains a canonical statement of and the challenges raised by the importance of History to the twenty-first century world.

This roundtable asks a wide range of authors to comment on the relevance and impact of the Manifesto. To what degree did the Manifesto’s challenges actively reshape history education, discourse, or the political focus of historians in various subfields or regions?