Radical History: Toward Inclusiveness

Abstract

The news that no reverse Gresham's law operates in Clio's realm will not surprise those who remember that once upon a time the work of U. B. Phillips shut that of Herbert Aptheker out of the academy, as that of Claude Bowers did the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, points made by Jonathan Wiener in reconstructing the dynamic of professional legitimation. It is not enough for historians to be intelligent and hardworking to earn respectful peer consideration - it was certainly not enough for the radical historians discussed here. Wiener's reasonable contention is that what changed the way many historians now understand their discipline were the social and political upheavals generated by the civil rights and antiwar movements. He reiterates the coeval significance of the former, by my count, four times Blacks have shown the role history plays in defining a social movement, proclaims the 1970 Women's Liberation issue of Radical America. Is it then picayune, if not paranoid, of me to be dismayed by the virtual invisibility of African-American historians among Wiener's radicals? I would have thought that the duree in radical historiography of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction deserves more than the ceremonial sentence it receives here, and that Eric Williams's seminal Capitalism and Slavery also deserves citation, even if, arguably, the polemical scholarship of Rayford Logan does not. I would also have anticipated at least an obligatory sentence mentioning the 1971 anatomical study of law and race by Mary Frances Berry and the 1976 bottom-up monograph on black migration by Nell Painter, as well as the 1977 structuralist Reconstruction study by Thomas Holt, works clearly in the spirit of radical revisionism. Their omission has a large and deplorable significance in an essay about the coming-of-age of a school of history that gives flesh and voice to non-elites and, by influence if not by mandate, provides an analytical framework for the empowerment of ordinary men and women. It suggests, whatever the intention of the individual historian, an arrogance of vision, an unconscious proprietariness, vis-a-vis African-American historiography quite analogous to the professional mind-set identified and relentlessly exposed in Edward