Posted on 09/28/2012 12:54:18 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
Eugene D. Genovese, an American historian known for his writings on the Civil War and slavery, died Wednesday. He was 82.
Dr. Genovese taught and guest-lectured at several colleges and universities across the country, including Emory University, Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, Rutgers University, the University of Rochester and the College of William & Mary.
An Atlanta resident, Dr. Genovese has been called one of the most influential historians of slavery and the antebellum South by his colleagues. He wrote several books, including his 1976 “Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made.” He also wrote three books with his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, an Emory University history professor who died in 2007.
According to an online biography, Dr. Genovese began his career in the ’60s as an “avowed Marxist” whose advocacy of the Viet Cong was the center of much debate, especially in academic settings. But by the ’90s, he’d become “intellectually, politically, and morally disillusioned” with Marxism and converted to Roman Catholicism with his wife. The couple then helped establish the Historical Society “to resist the encroachment of ideology in historical studies,” the bio says.
(Excerpt) Read more at ajc.com ...
They will be missed by many. May God grant them eternal well-being, redemption and rest for their souls.
Memory eternal.
I went to a symposium in 1976 with Dr. Genovese as the principle speaker. The symposium was sponsored by the history department that I was a student in (Northern Illinois University). One (but not the only) reason I left graduate history studies was because I wanted no part of the group that I viewed as Marxist crackpots. It is a pleasure to find out that such a hardcore left-wing ideologue could come to find higher truth.
And his analysis remains the most common sense view I've ever seen.
I read Roll, Jordan, Roll. I liked it.
While he was known as a leftist, he was one of those rare honest left-wing scholars who always let the facts tell the story. I relied on his stuff a great deal for “Patriot’s History of the United States.” I hope he’s at the library in the sky.
Some leftists are impossible for me to read, others I barely notice. I don’t know if it’s letting tgd facts speak for themselves, because conservatives’ favorite socialist, Orwell, didn’t. Of course he wasn’t a historian.
tgd = the
He was good, as was his wife.
Way back when I was studying American history, Genovese was a leftist icon. Fascinating to read that he left behind his admiration for Marxism. I wish a great many of his contemporaries and their students had done the same.
He was a great writer as well as historian.
I wonder how historians will portray this time in history.
RIP.
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