I am happy to report that the hardback edition of Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West is now out and available for library adoptions.
I contributed an essay to this collective volume and enjoyed working with Isabella Lazzarini, Luciano Piffanelli, and Diego Pirillo on the project.
Abstract
Opening a fresh chapter in the burgeoning field of premodern diplomatic history, Reframing Treaties focuses on peacemaking through a wide geopolitical and constitutional range of case studies not limited to Europe, but including also the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, and along a chronological time frame which centres on the period between the 14th and the 18th centuries but explores crossings, continuities, and afterlives up to the 21st century. The volume has two main general objectives. First, to rethink the peacemaking process and uncover the flow of negotiations that shaped late medieval and early modern political interactions. Secondly, to add an important contribution to the ongoing debate about Eurocentrism and its consequences by breaking down one of the most spectacular mechanisms (the system of the European great treaties) that helped make Western late medieval ius commune and early modern ius gentium become a purported ‘universal international order’ in the 19th century and beyond. With a multidisciplinary approach, the volume puts at the heart of the investigation not the single peace treaty, but the peacemaking process in its many forms and outcomes and demonstrates that peacemaking was a complex and multilayered phenomenon. Used as a political grammar, its binding nature transformed it into a powerful instrument to settle conflicts and regulate interactions both within and outside polities and communities. The volume is organised into four parts (Sources, Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, and Intersections), and 21 chapters and an Epilogue (chapter 22), and brings together an international team of specialists from European and American universities and from different fields.
I am looking forward to the first session of a new research seminar on Climate Change and Religious Conflicts(Changements Climatiques et Conflits Religieux)!
This is a seminar that my colleague Jérémie Foa (Aix-Marseille Université and TELEMMe) and I are co-organizing at the Iméra · Institut d’Etudes Avancées d’Aix Marseille Université.
The seminar sessions will be held in hybrid format, so please contact me via email (at bsandberg@niu.edu) if you would like a Zoom link to participate.
Seminar Sessions:
Monday 20 October 2025
Monday 3 November 2025
Monday 17 November 2025
Monday 1 December 2025
The seminar sessions will be held from 14:30 to 16:30 (Marseille time) in the Salle de réunion de la Maison Neuve de l’Iméra.
Every university and college in the United States is facing a direct, multi-pronged assault from the Trump administration.
Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP):
“This is obviously the most intense assault on higher education by the federal government in the history of the United States,” he said. “Everyone is coming into fire.”
Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Photo: The Guardian.
“Students and faculty heading back to US colleges and universities from summer break are returning to bruised institutions reeling from the Trump administration’s unprecedented campaign to bend higher education to its ideological will, and are bracing for more uncertainty ahead,” according to The Guardian.
“At the University of Utah, the Black student union has lost its funding and campus space – one of many student groups to face the brunt of Donald Trump’s anti-diversity measures. Indiana’s public universities have cut or merged more than 400 degree programs, about one-fifth of their academic offerings, while scores of other universities have made similar cuts as their budgets are on the line. At Harvard and Columbia, certain forms of criticism of Israel will now be punishable as antisemitism. And across the country, schools will see their international student population plummet after the administration erected a host of new barriers to students seeking to travel to the US.”
Harvard University. Photo: The Guardian.
Unfortunately, many U.S. citizens and journalists seem to be focused primarily on the Trump administration’s coercion of elite Ivy League universities like Harvard, Columbia, and Brown. Some attention is being paid to the plight of flagship public research universities like UCLA, Virginia, and Indiana.
However, President Trump’s political appointees and operatives in the so-called DOGE, Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Program, and other federal agencies are pursuing a nation-wide assault on higher education that is already transforming universities and their research and teaching missions.
State universities, regional comprehensive universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges are all feeling the effects of the Trump administration’s anti-democratic policies that restrict student visas, harass international and undocumented students, restrict academic research topics, remove scientific data from federal agency websites, freeze grant funding, terminate grants and fellowships, politicize peer review processes, restrict academic publications, alter research findings and museum exhibitions, distort academic research presentation, and threaten academic freedom.
The Trump administration has also unlawfully targeted students, researchers, and professors directly by detaining students and researchers, stripping student and researcher visas, threatening to remove students’ and researchers’ permanent resident or citizenship status, firing research officers and administrators, packing university and academic boards of directors, threatening and firing museum directors, and coercing university presidents and pressuring them to resign.
Make no mistake, the Trump administration’s clear goal is to disrupt the entire American model of higher education, destroying university autonomy, research integrity, democratic access to higher education, and academic freedom in the process.
Speri, Alice. “‘Everyone is Coming into Fire’: Students Return to US Campuses Bruised and Changed by Trump’s Assault.” The Guardian (23 August 2025).
The Trump administration’s limits on visa programs, suspension of student visas, and harassment of international students have already significantly reduced the number of international students applying to attend universities in the United States.
“Major international education search platforms, including IDP and Keystone Education Group, have detected a marked decline in student interest in American programs. Among academic administrators polled by the Institute for International Education this spring, more than usual reported drops in international applications for the coming year,” according to The New York Times.
The Institute for International Education (IIE) report from Spring 2025 indicates that “in the 2025/26 academic year, a higher proportion of U.S. respondent institutions anticipate a decline in their international student numbers across all academic levels.”
The New York Times points out that “these are not the first signs that American higher education is losing its dominant position. For years, countries in Asia have been strengthening their universities and marketing them to students around the world. With more appealing alternatives, the Trump administration’s hostile stance may hasten the decline in U.S. higher education pre-eminence.”
Yonsei University, South Korea. Photo: The New York Times.
“‘We’re shifting from a world in which there were only a few primary target destination countries to a much more multipolar world,’ said Clay Harmon, the executive director of the Association of International Enrollment Management, which represents recruitment agencies.”
President Trump’s threats against international students and researchers align with his administration’s broader anti-immigration, anti-scientific, and anti-education policies.
The Trump administration’s coordinated assault on research and higher education has already seriously damaged American research universities’ reputations and positions within the worldwide higher education landscape. Academic freedom, research integrity, and international education are all threatened in the United States.
Many international students from Asian nations are looking elsewhere for undergraduate and graduate degree programs.
“For decades, in the English-speaking world, Oxford and Cambridge in Britain, the Ivy League in the United States, and other name-brand universities in Australia and Canada tended to top application checklists,” according to The New York Times.
However, the international academic landscape has been changing recently. The New York Times emphasizes that “gradually, schools in China, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore started showing up in annual rankings of the top universities — with lower price tags. Governments dispatched representatives to college fairs and set goals for the number of students they wanted to bring in every year.”
The Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigrant and anti-education policies have now accelerated this trend.
The suspension of visas of international students who already studying in the United States has terrified international students at universities and colleges across the nation—not just at the elite Ivy League universities. The U.S. government’s threats toward international students are clearly discouraging many potential international students from applying.
“So when Mr. Trump, soon after starting his second term, began pushing international students away, Asian nations started welcoming students who couldn’t continue their studies at American schools,” according to The New York Times.
“In the spring, Korea University was among several institutions to offer relief measures as the U.S. government began canceling some student visas and terminating funding programs. Another South Korean school, Yonsei University, will open rolling admissions for undergraduate transfers year round starting in 2026 and is planning a customized visiting program for students whose coursework is interrupted in the United States.”
Universities around the world are now competing to assert their positions within a rapidly changing global order of higher education.
Meanwhile, universities and colleges in the United States will suffer declining international undergraduate student enrollments, forcing them to make further budget cuts or raise tuition for American students. The ability of research universities in the United States to conduct scientific, medical, social science, and arts and humanities research will also be greatly diminished, as many promising graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from around the world go elsewhere to pursue their research.
DePillis, Lydia and Jin Yu Young. “As Trump Pushes International Students Away, Asian Schools Scoop Them Up.” The New York Times (14 August 2025).
Baer, Julie and Nora Nemeth. “Spring 2025 Snapshot on International Educational Exchange.” Institute for International Education (July 2025).
President Trump has launched a coordinated effort to efface the historical record of the United States in the national museums of the Smithsonian Institution.
“The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it would begin a wide-ranging review of current and planned exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, scouring wall text, websites and social media ‘to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals,'” according to The New York Times.
This “review” will clearly be conducted as an unacademic, ahistoric, and politicized process to rewrite history to align with the Trumpist Republican Party’s partisan vision of the history of the United States.
The Trump administration claims to want to present a history that is “unifying” and in “alignment with American ideals.”
Many previous statements by President Trump and members of his administration make clear that their goal is to create a politicized and reactionary version of so-called “patriotic” history and American “exceptionalism.”
This explicitly partisan vision of “American ideals” ignores the realities of the complicated and contradictory history of the United States, which has often failed to live up to the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
The Trump administration’s partisan “review” and rewriting of history will clearly focus on Americans of European heritage in advancing a racist White Nationalist historical narrative.
Trump administration officials aim to limit discussions of the historical contributions of African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and other minority groups at Smithsonian museums.
For this reason, the Trump administration is specifically targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, and National Museum of American History, which have revised and expanded their presentations of United States history in recent years, incorporating new historical research by academic historians and professional public historians.
The Trump administration also plans to scrub the Smithsonian museums of references to controversial policies, unsavory episodes, and atrocities committed by the federal government or within the territories of the United States.
National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photo: The New York Times.
Here, Trump and his White Nationalist allies want to remove or minimize the historical realities of the slave trade, plantation slavery, Jim Crow era lynchings, and segregation at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. They want to minimize the struggles and the achievements of African Americans who fought for voting rights and representation during the Civil Rights movement and up to today.
The Trump administration intends to remove references to atrocities, massacres, and ethnic cleansing carried out by settlers, companies, state governments, and the United States Army against Amerindians at the National Museum of the American Indian.
National Museum of the American Indian. Photo: The New York Times.
The New York Times reports that “White House officials announced the review in a letter sent to Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian. Museums will be required to adjust any content that the administration finds problematic within 120 days, the letter said, ‘replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions.'”
“The review, which will begin with eight of the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, is the latest attempt by President Trump to try to impose his will on the Smithsonian, which has traditionally operated as an independent institution that regards itself outside the purview of the executive branch.”
Samuel J. Redman, Professor of History (University of Massachusetts Amherst) has rightly characterized the Trump administration’s review as “a full assault on the autonomy of all the different branches of the institution.”
Indeed, the Trump administration’s partisan political effort aims to undermine the documentary research and historical analysis carried out by academic historians and professional public historians, which have contributed to the current Smithsonian Institution’s exhibitions. This is a direct attack on the academic freedom of professional historians and museum curators to conduct historical research and present their findings in the public interest of all United States citizens.
The Smithsonian museums safeguard the historical objects and documents of the nation’s past and they preserve the historical memory of the United States.
The Trump-appointed officials who will carry out the “review” of the Smithsonian museums aim to replace documented historical presentation with a purely partisan and politicized image of the United States that conforms to President Trump’s fundamentally ahistoric vision of the nation’s past.
A widespread program to distort the documented historical record of the United States has begun.
Bowley, Graham, Jennifer Schuessler, and Robin Pogrebin. “White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions.” The New York Times(13 August 2025).
President Trump has ordered a politicized rewriting of history at the national museums of the Smithsonian Institution.
Trump’s order initiates a new offensive in the ongoing War on History, which represents one front in a broader set of Culture Wars.
“The White House is planning an extensive review into the Smithsonian Institution to ensure that its exhibitions reflect the administration’s view of American history ahead of the country’s 250th birthday — a move that comes amid President Donald Trump’s broader takeover of the nation’s cultural institutions,” according to Politico.
This is the latest move by the Trump administration to pressure leaders of the Smithsonian Institution and to alter the historical narratives presented in its museums.
“In a letter sent to Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch and subsequently posted on the White House website on Tuesday, three administration officials outlined areas subject to review and revision in an effort to ‘reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story,'” Politico reports.
“‘This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,’ senior associate staff secretary Lindsey Halligan, Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Haley and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought wrote in the letter.”
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, Smithsonian Institution. Photo: Politico.
Politico reports that “The review aims to adjust not only the museums’ public exhibitions, planning and curation, but also narrative standards and collection use.
“The move is the latest in a sweeping effort by the Trump administration to overhaul how American history and culture is taught and presented in institutions across the country — from universities to museums to Washington’s Kennedy Center for the performing arts.”
David W. Blight, Professor of History (Yale University) and President of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), recently published a scathing criticism of the Trump administration’s assault on History.
Blight argues: “On March 27, President Donald Trump, echoing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, issued an executive order, ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.’ The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the purpose and substance of the nation’s treasures at the Smithsonian Institution. The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums. In other words, Trump’s team has declared war on free minds and free education in order to erase more than a half-century of scholarship and replace it with official triumphal narratives rooted in a brand of pickled patriotism designed to force the past to serve the present.”
Blight’s essay is a call for mobilization of the entire historical profession to resist the Trumpist agenda to politicize historical narratives and deform the historical record.
Ewing, Giselle Ruhiyyih. “White House Announces Smithsonian Review Amid Trump’s Cultural Reckoning.” Politico (12 August 2025).
Blight, David W. “What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance?” The New Republic (7 August 2025).
Constructing European Historical Narratives in the Early Modern World, edited by Hilary J. Bernstein, Fabien Montcher, and Megan Armstrong, is being published by Iter Press and will be released in paperback in December 2025.
I enjoyed contributing an essay on “Crusading Engagements: French Nobles’ Family Histories of Religious Violence” to this collective volume.
The book description reads:
“This volume showcases the diversity of contributors and voices that intervened and shaped historical narratives in early modern Europe.
“Exploring the art of crafting historical narratives during the early modern period, Constructing European Historical Narratives in the Early Modern World reflects on the social and political implications of the diversification of research methods and writing practices associated with historical writing. It does so by considering the global and local situatedness of historical narratives from the perspective of both their makers and publics while interrogating the extent of the hegemony that a composite European world acquired over the elaboration of historical narratives.
“The contributions to this volume take into account historical texts ranging from those most concerned with the self—revealing questions of personal or familial agency and identity—to those in which groups of writers collaborated to produce engaged narratives, to those focused on broader, disembodied concepts, such as language development and geographical features, using a significant mixture of textual references and personal experience. This volume deliberately mixes studies from numerous parts of Europe and its colonial outposts and juxtaposes writings by published scholars with the manuscript testimonies of occasional memorialists.”
“As the Supreme Court’s decisions increasingly turn on their understanding of the distant past, the number of supporting briefs from historians has exploded and their influence has grown,” according to Adam Liptak, who has published an article in The New York Times on historical advocacy in amicus briefs.
Historical advocacy takes many forms, but it is nice to see a news article focusing on one of the ways in which professional historians advocate on policy issues based on their historical expertise.
Liptak’s article examines the ways in which the extensive use of historical claims by lawyers and judges affiliated with the legal theory of “originalism” has led a rapid increase in amicus briefs by professional historians. Many professors of history and historical researchers have filed amicus briefs in Supreme Court cases, responding to blatant distortions of the historical record by lawyers and judges.
Chief Justice John Roberts. Image: The New York Times.
“Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton, a prominent federal appeals court judge, was already marveling at the beginnings of the phenomenon in a 2009 law review article, noting that ‘honest-to-goodness historians, as opposed to lawyer historians,’ had filed supporting briefs in major Supreme Court cases on the Second Amendment and efforts to combat terrorism,” according to Liptak.
“‘By my count (an admittedly rough count),’ [Sutton] wrote, ‘historians filed more amicus briefs in the last four years than they filed in the preceding seven decades combined.'”
“Since then, bona fide historians have filed scores of additional briefs, according to a recent study in The Journal of American Constitutional History. And those filings have been cited by the justices at a sharply higher rate than other sorts of supporting briefs, except for those filed by lawyers for the federal government.”
By “bona fide historians,” Liptak is referring to professors of history and professional public historians, such as historians who work at federal agencies, Smithsonian Institute museums, state institutions, historical museums, archives, and other institutions.
“‘With the rise of history-based arguments at the Supreme Court, we’ve had a rise in briefs filed by actual historians,’ said M. Henry Ishitani, who conducted the study. A recent graduate of Yale Law School, he is teaching legal history at the University of Tulsa College of Law while finishing his history dissertation at Yale.”
This form of historical advocacy especially involves constitutional historians and legal historians who work on the History of the United States. But, historians working on history of politics, democracy, civil rights, race, women, gender, sexuality, class, labor unions, economics, environment, science, medicine, civil-military relations, violence, international relations, warfare, and many other historical issues may also provide historical expertise on legal cases.
Historical advocacy can take on many forms beyond simply providing expertise in legal cases.
Professors of history and public historians have a civic duty to preserve archives, historical records, and public history. This is part of their broader mission to defend academic freedom, democratic institutions, constitutional law, and the common good.
It certainly seems that professional historians will be increasingly called on to conduct historical advocacy as a part of their core duties.
Liptak, Adam. “As the Supreme Court Focuses on the Past, Historians Turn to Advocacy.” The New York Times (4 August 2025).
The Trump administration’s war on higher education is targeting the entire American research university model of excellence, which is based on open recruitment and democratic access to higher education.
One key part of Trump’s attack aims to decrease the number of international students in the United States.
The recent coerced agreement that the Trump administration extorted from Columbia University administrators makes this aim abundantly clear.
“The Trump administration is using rules, policies and formal agreements to compel and discourage U.S. universities from enrolling international students. A controversial immigration clause in the administration’s agreement with Columbia University represents the latest move to decrease international student enrollment. Settlements with other schools could soon follow. Despite what economists and educators view as the benefits of international students, Trump officials, led by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, appear determined to reduce the number of international students who enter and remain in the United States to work,” Forbes reports.
Columbia University. Image: Forbes.
“On July 23, 2025, Trump officials and Columbia University signed an agreement after the administration withheld over $400 million in federal research funds. The Trump administration accused the school of not sufficiently combating antisemitism on campus. Under the agreement, Columbia will pay $200 million to the U.S. Treasury and an additional $21 million into a fund associated with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to settle claims. A Resolution Monitor will ‘monitor Columbia’s compliance’ with those and other provisions. Columbia’s leadership decided that future and current funding, more than $1 billion, would remain at risk without a settlement,” according to Forbes.
“The agreement includes a controversial provision that commits Columbia University to decreasing international student enrollment. The measure has received little attention. On page nine, the agreement states, ‘Columbia will examine its business model and take steps to decrease financial dependence on international student enrollment.'”
“The measure is extraordinary, given that international students typically pay higher tuition than domestic students. Admitting more international students would likely improve the school’s finances.”
The Trump administration’s policies are seriously damaging research universities in the United States and threatening their ability to provide world-class higher education to international and American students alike.
Ever since the Second World War, American research universities have been the leading higher education institutions in the world, in large part because of their openness and their international recruitment of students, researchers, and professors from around the globe.
The political leaders of other nations have often worried about a “brain drain” of the “best and brightest” researchers from their societies to the United States. Now, the United States is beginning to experience a reverse “brain drain” of international students staying home and international researchers in the United States returning to their home countries.
Anderson, Stuart. “Trump And Miller Compel Colleges Not To Enroll International Students.” Forbes (4 August 2025).
The Trump administration’s war on higher education is hitting state universities and community colleges across the nation.
On the impacts of the Trump administration’s attacks on community colleges:
“Since January, the Trump administration has waged war on the nation’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities, freezing billions of dollars in research grants to Harvard and blasting away at Columbia’s institutional autonomy. But collateral damage from these attacks has engulfed schools of all types, including the country’s 1,100 community colleges, which educate about 6.4 million undergraduates each year — roughly 40 percent of the national total and more than twice as many as are enrolled at every highly selective college and university in the country combined,” The New York Times reports.
A class at Delta Community College. Photo: The New York Times.
“Like their four-year counterparts, community colleges are grappling with disappearing federal grants, shuttered D.E.I. offices, eliminated programs, canceled cultural convocations and panicked students and staff. At Delta, many of the grants that fund financial aid for low-income students and the staff that support them have been eliminated or threatened. I went to see the hydraulic-circuit class in part because of how much government funding, a great deal of it federal, it takes to make the teaching possible. It was hardly the only class I could have chosen: Federal funding helps pay not just for heavy machinery used in courses like the one taught by Luna but also, elsewhere on the Delta campus, for the full dental lab for aspiring hygienists; the X-ray machines surrounded by lead-lined walls for radiography students; and the robotic medical mannequins, one that pushed out little baby mannequins and could simulate everything from a breech birth to a health emergency.”
Austen, Ben. “Trump Went to War With the Ivies. Community Colleges Are Being Hit.” The New York Times (4 August 2025).
Brian Sandberg: Historical Perspectives 