These historians oversee unbiased accounts of U.S. foreign policy. Trump fired them all.

Huge volumes, bound in the timeless, red buckram linen of legacy books, are historians’ gold - and crucial to the nation’s understanding of how U.S. foreign policy is made.

There is a dispatch from Japan to President Abraham Lincoln’s administration describing the “bloody affair” of July 1861, the “daring and murderous attacks” by samurai warriors on British diplomats stationed in Edo, now known as Tokyo.

There is the top-secret report that pushed President Harry S. Truman to authorize covert actions in peacetime in 1947 to counter the “vicious psychological efforts” by the Soviet Union.

And then there’s the telegram handed over at 12:15 p.m. on April 18, 1961, from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to President John F. Kennedy hours after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, warning that the action endangers peace “for the whole world. … It is a secret to no one that the armed bands invading this country were trained, equipped and armed in the United States of America.”

An advisory committee of diverse historians helps ensure that the record of America’s history - especially classified and covert actions - remains unbiased, transparent and thorough.

President Donald Trump just fired all of the members of the committee.

These advisers help oversee the exhaustive publication series called the Foreign Relations of the United States - or the FRUS, as insiders call it - and lawmakers rely on it daily. It is available to the public in major libraries and online.

The volume began in 1861, when Congress demanded a full account of Lincoln’s foreign policy during the Civil War. More than 450 volumes have been printed since.

Later accusations that the documentation was partisan or incomplete were addressed with a congressional statute requiring the setup of an advisory committee of diverse historians.

Without proper oversight, “a great many of the important facts of recent history still remain secret long after security requirements have expired,” Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) wrote in a June 1953 editorial in the Rutland Daily Herald, pointing to huge gaps in the historical records from the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the early 1930s.

“Instead, the American people have had only the charges and counter-charges of political campaigns on which to base their impressions,” Smith said. She said she was worried that the historical narrative will “rely on the politically-colored partisan accounts of some of the participants.”

Sarah B. Snyder, a history professor at American University who specializes in the Cold War and was one of the historians fired by Trump, says the FRUS is “important for historical scholarship.”

“But it’s also important for the reputation of the United States in the world, to be seen as forthright about our country’s history,” she said after receiving the one-line message the other committee members received in April:

“On behalf of President Donald Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position on the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” said one of the termination emails obtained by The Washington Post and sent on April 30 by Cate Dillon, the White House liaison to the State Department.

Dillon did not respond to a request for comment on the reasons for the terminations.

A senior State Department official responded that “there is a plan in place to maintain the committee.” The State Department website currently lists all of the positions as vacant.

The Historical Advisory Committee - “the HAC,” in Washington lingo - is made up of nine academics nominated to serve rotating terms by the biggest and most prestigious associations in the discipline. That’s what the 1991 statute mandated.

According to the committee chair, the associations have heard nothing more from the Trump administration about maintaining the committee since receiving the termination letters just weeks before their next gathering.

Trump issued executive orders in March stating that he wants to shape the narrative of U.S. history in curriculum and museums to avoid “a sense of national shame.” But disbanding a committee created under President George H.W. Bush won’t impact the way the story of Trump’s administration is told anytime soon, historians said.

The committee reviews classified material and covert actions from past administrations that have reached the 30-year mark, which allows them to be declassified.

“Right now, the office is still trying to get volumes out from the Reagan era,” said James Goldgeier, a professor and former dean at American University’s School of International Service, who was chair of the HAC before he was fired. “There’s no work that’s being done here regarding the current administration.”

Goldgeier said he suspects the committee’s dismantling may be part of the federal firings that have been the hallmark of Trump’s first 100 days.

“It just seems to me like they just got a list from all the agencies” of federal advisory committees, he said. “I can’t imagine they looked much into what any of the particular ones did. And I don’t know that they understood that this one is congressionally mandated.”

The firings don’t hold up as a cost-cutting move to target government waste, said Melani McAlister, an American University professor of American studies and international affairs who served on the HAC and got a stipend of about $250 for each of the quarterly meetings.

“It’s not about the money,” McAlister said. “The idea that this is somehow about government efficiency can’t be true.”

It’s largely a prestige post, and a chance to work with highly classified materials that historians wonder about but rarely get to see. All of the historians on the committee have full security clearance, and much of their work is sifting through huge amounts of classified material and working with agencies like the CIA to declassify, organize and present the massive volume of information each administration generates.

Richard Immerman, past chair of the committee and a history professor at Temple University, said that Trump spoke of dismantling the committee during his first term. But a compromise was reached requiring term limits for committee members to encourage more rotation.

The committee meets four times a year to report on its progress organizing, declassifying and analyzing mounds of information from telegrams, emails, field dispatches, letters, status reports, agreements and more.

They are the ones who collect declassified material and are the apolitical watchdogs over what is released and how it is presented, especially when it comes to covert, sensitive or possibly embarrassing revelations. They write reports summarizing their findings and edit what the State Department historian presents for publication.

Without their input, the State Department’s publications and declassification would be without oversight, as was the case in 1953, when Smith called the reports “partisan” and incomplete.

McAlister said she believes the firings are an intentional move to have power over the telling of history.

“You would have to try very hard to even know the HAC existed,” she said. “When people start targeting the telling of history, that becomes very dangerous for democracy.”