Eugene D. Genovese: Historian of slavery

Radical History Review

Volumn 88, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 52-67

  Kolchin, Peter ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77449146961     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2004-88-52     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Of course, no one individual made it possible for radicals to be accepted by the academic mainstream. For an informative survey, see Jonathan M. Wiener, "Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959-1980," Journal of American History 76.2 (1989): 399-434.
2. Wiener noted that radical scholars in the 1950s and 1960s typically faced persecution less for their radical scholarship than for their radical political activities (404). Change came quickly: in contrast to its tenuous hold in the 1960s, "radical history in the age of Reagan occupied the strongest position it has ever held in American universities" (434).
3. The quotation is from Eugene D. Genovese, "On Being a Socialist and a Historian," in In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (New York: Pantheon, 1971), 4.
4. In his foreword to the 1966 reprint of Phillips's American Negro Slavery (1918)
5. Genovese declared that "Phillips came close to greatness as a historian, perhaps as close as any historian this country has yet produced"; Genovese, "Foreword: Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and His Critics," in American Negro Slavery, by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), vii.
6. Introducing a reprint of this foreword, Genovese noted the "harsh truth" that "racists like Phillips, until recently, have taught us much more about the South, and the Southern black man too, than their Northern liberal detractors have ever been able to do. I am sorry about that. It is terribly annoying. But there is not much to be done about it." Genovese, In Red and Black, 260.
7. Genovese was not always so generous in his evaluation of the contributions of radical historians, whether Marxist or non-Marxist. See, for example, Eugene D. Genovese, "Staughton Lynd As Historian and Ideologue," in In Red and Black, 354-67.
8. But see, too, his later apology for having been "unfair" to Herbert Aptheker: Eugene D. Genovese, "Herbert Aptheker," in The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 201.
9. Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon, 1965);
10. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon, 1969);
11. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974);
12. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979);
13. and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
14. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, review of Roll, Jordan, Roll, Journal of Southern History 41.2 (1975): 240, 242.
15. On negative reaction to The Political Economy of Slavery, see Wiener, "Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History," 409.
16. According to its Web site (www.bu.edu/historic/about.html), the Historical Society aims to "revitalize the study and teaching of history by reorienting the historical profession toward an accessible, integrated history free from fragmentation and over-specialization." Genovese served as the Historical Society's first president from 1998 to 2000.
17. Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Intellectual and Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
18. For the historiography of slavery revisionism, see Peter J. Parish, Slavery: History and Historians (New York: Harper and Row, 1989);
19. Mark M. Smith, Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
20. Peter Kolchin, "American Historians and Antebellum Southern Slavery, 1959-1984," in A Master's Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald, ed. William J. Cooper Jr., Michael F. Holt, and John McCardell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 87-111;
21. and Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), esp. the afterword and the bibliographical essay, 239-49, 269-315.
22. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery; Fox-Genovese and Genovese, "The Janus Face of Merchant Capital," in Fruits of Merchant Capital, 3-25;
23. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), esp. 59-78, 86-106, 191-209, 232-57;
24. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989), esp. 60-113;
25. Edward Pessen, "How Different Were the Antebellum North and South?" American Historical Review 85.5 (1980): 1119-49;
26. James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Knopf, 1982). In a subsequent book, however, Oakes retreated from his earlier position on the nature of the Old South and came close to Genovese's;
27. see James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Knopf, 1990). On these debates
28. see Douglas R. Egerton, "Markets without a Market Revolution: Southern Planters and Capitalism," Journal of the Early Republic 16.2 (1996): 207-21;
29. and Peter Kolchin, A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 7-38.
30. Quotations are from Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 3;
31. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, 129;
32. and Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 86.
33. For very different interpretations emphasizing the racial basis of proslavery ideology, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 43-96;
34. and Oakes, The Ruling Race, for example, 34.
35. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 159-284.
36. For the focus on slave agency in the revisionist literature of the 1970s, see Kolchin, "American Historians and Antebellum Southern Slavery," esp. 88-95.
37. Eugene D. Genovese, "The Treatment of Slaves in Different Countries: Problems in the Application of the Comparative Method," in Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History, ed. Laura Foner and Genovese (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 202-10;
38. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made;
39. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution.
40. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery, 35;
41. Fox-Genovese and Genovese, "The Janus Face of Merchant Capital," 4, 5.
42. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery; Fox-Genovese and Genovese, "The Janus Face of Merchant Capital," esp. 16. On the free-labor indictment of slavery for creating a distinctive, backward South, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), esp. 40-72, 301-17.
43. James D. Anderson, "Aunt Jemima in Dialectics: Genovese on Slave Culture," Journal of Negro History 61.1 (1976): 100;
44. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 4.
45. For an additional critique, see Clarence E. Walker, "Massa's New Clothes: A Critique of Eugene D. Genovese on Southern Society, Master-Slave Relations, and Slave Behavior," in Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 56-72.
46. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 146, 658.
47. Ibid., 283.
48. See John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972; rev. ed., 1979);
49. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976);
50. Larry E. Hudson Jr., To Have and To Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997);
51. and many of the essays in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993).
52. This question points to the widespread absence of that central historical component, change over time, from much of the literature of the 1970s. Historical change has been more in evidence in recent, "post-revisionist, " scholarship on slavery. See, for example, Kolchin, American Slavery;
53. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
54. See Kolchin, "American Historians and Antebellum Southern Slavery," 102-6.
55. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, 22, 95, 101.
56. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution, 82, 96, 123.
57. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, "The Political Crisis of Social History: Class Struggle As Subject and Object," in Fruits of Merchant Capital, 193, 211-12, 201.
58. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, xv, 459;
59. Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 2;
60. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery, 30;
61. Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), xi, 7;
62. Eugene D. Genovese, "Christendom under Siege" (originally published in New Republic, August 13, 1990, as "The Arrogance of History"), in The Southern Front, 133.
63. Genovese, The Southern Front, x;
64. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, 14. For an anguished polemic on the responsibility of leftists for closing their eyes to the crimes of Stalin and other communists
65. see Eugene D. Genovese, "The Question," Dissent 41.3 (1994): 371-75. This piece is followed by critical responses from six prominent leftist scholars (377-85), and a final "Riposte" from Genovese (386-88).
66. In an interview completed in December 1998, Genovese noted that as late as 1995 he was "still a materialist and an atheist," albeit one "doing a lot of soul searching." Soon thereafter, Fox-Genovese, "a lifelong nonbeliever," converted to Catholicism, and a year later Genovese himself followed suit.
67. In the interview, he continued to send mixed ideological signals: Asserting that "Right, Center and Left" were "categories that have become worthless," he expressed his "strong appreciation" for the southern conservative tradition, but also suggested that "the short shrift given Marx by southern conservatives has led them into a cul-de-sac."
68. See "Eugene D. Genovese and History: An Interview," in Slavery, Secession, and Southern History, ed. Robert Louis Paquette and Louis A. Ferliger (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 209, 204, 200.
69. The quotation appears at the beginning of Genovese's essay, "Marxian Interpretations of the Slave South," in In Red and Black, 315.
70. Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 225.