The recent firing of a professor at Texas State University for protected political speech, the settlements forced upon universities by the federal administration, and the imposition of Project 2025 priorities in school curricula are among the several attacks on historical education that have exacerbated an ongoing crisis. In majority-Black cities such as New Orleans, these attacks affect the most vulnerable of students, who have already faced institutional and financial neglect. Educators continue to be on the frontline of these battles while trying to protect their students, maintain high educational standards, and remain true to their ethics. This panel considers the crisis in historical education through the experiences of teachers across institutional contexts—from K-12 educators in New Orleans to administrators and professors in R1 universities. It seeks to bring together the local context of our host city with the national context of broader federal attacks.

While this onslaught has troubled (and in some cases directly affected) members of the American Historical Association, it is educators who have long taught about race, gender, politics, Palestine, and critical American history that face ongoing surveillance, censorship, and professional consequences for their pedagogy. Moreover, as this panel foregrounds, it is the material conditions of labor that exacerbate precarity for educators teaching these subjects in underfunded schools and as adjunct lecturers.

Chris Dier, New Orleans’ 2020 Teacher of the Year, will discuss his recent federal lawsuit regarding obligatory teaching of the Ten Commandments in Louisiana schools. Matt Schwarzfeld, from the open-enrollment public charter Morris Jeff Community School in New Orleans, discusses his experiences teaching low-income students of color in a school district under political attack. Alyssa Bivins, an administrator at George Mason and adjunct Professorial Lecturer in History at George Washington University, connects her expertise in the history of Palestinian education with her current work as an adjunct faculty teaching on the Middle East. Kevin Hoskins, former head of curricular development for the popular Choices Program at Brown University, which produced curricular material for high school history education, discusses the cancellation of the program under pressure from the Trump administration.

The experiences of the panelists on this roundtable are a testament to the ongoing crisis in historical education against those who teach histories of racial inequality, gender and sexuality, settler colonialism, slavery, and other “controversial” yet essential topics in U.S. and global history. But the roundtable hopes to attest just as much to the resilient efforts and varied strategies of these educators in teaching “difficult histories” during attacks on academic free speech.