Abstract: While members of the Human Resource Development (HRD) community have long worked to establish historical narratives for the field, these have generally failed to foreground issues of race. Over the last 15 years the HRD community has developed a critical mass of scholarship related to racism, however, the field has yet to produce a substantive body of race focused historical scholarship leaving a gap in our understanding about how historical racial inequities have shaped current workplace racial injustice. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a critical analysis of the uses of history in the field of Human Resource Development (HRD). By drawing on key historical writings, we will argue that attempts to construct a history of HRD have, by and large, contributed to the centering of Euro-American experiences and perspectives of the field, and that Euro-American constructions of HRD have operated hand-in hand with efforts to distance the field from its roots in Adult Education (AE).
