The program's premise is that history is a space of inquiry that is critical to all human understanding, and that The New School for Social Research is a natural place for historians, philosophers, and social scientists to come together to develop theoretically informed and critical approaches to historical questions.

The Committee on Historical Studies was founded in 1984 by Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, Aristide Zolberg, and Ira Katznelson, and has had a distinguished trajectory since its inception. Its premise is that history is a space of inquiry that is critical to all human understanding, and that The New School for Social Research is a natural place for historians, philosophers, and social scientists to come together to develop theoretically informed and critical approaches to historical questions. CHS differs from the normal department in that it is not organized around any single intellectual discipline, but seeks instead to bring historians together with social scientists and philosophers to produce critical histories of the present. Graduate training is accordingly committed to interdisciplinarity. CHS recognizes that historical inquiry has transformative potential for interpretation and theory in the social sciences. Its mission is to rejuvenate the empirically based social sciences with humanities-inspired, linguistically informed, and pictorially sympathetic approaches, and to provide The New School for Social Research-an institution that represents the most refined European critical tradition-with an archive and a perspective on the world that works "from the outside in," unsettling dominant perspectives with a radical alterity of global pasts. This perspective, known in CHS as "peripheral vision," explores the potential embedded in the study of history.