Stuart Forbes Macintyre AO, FAHA, FASSA (21 April 1947 – 22 November 2021) was an Australian historian, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne from 1999 to 2008.
While a postgraduate student at Monash in the early 1970s, Macintyre joined the Left Tendency faction of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), which was particularly strong at the campus.
His CPA membership lapsed while he was studying in the United Kingdom and, on returning to Australia, he joined the Australian Labor Party.
He also served as chairperson of the Humanities and Creative Arts Panel of the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2003.
He served as president of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History.
The book was launched by former Prime Minister of Australia Paul Keating, who took the opportunity to criticise conservative views of Australian history, and those who hold them (such as the then current Prime Minister John Howard), saying that they suffered from "a failure of imagination", and said that The History Wars "rolls out the canvas of this debate".
[8] Macintyre's critics, such as Gregory Melleuish (history lecturer at the University of Wollongong), responded to the book by declaring that Macintyre was a partisan history warrior himself, and that "its primary arguments are derived from the pro-Communist polemics of the Cold War".
[9] Keith Windschuttle said that Macintyre attempted to "caricature the history debate" but failed to explain what he meant.