Eugene genovese biography
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Eugene Genovese ()
&#; Christopher Phelps
AFTER HIS DEATH last year at the age of 82, most obituaries of Eugene Genovese &#; the historian of American slavery whose masterpiece, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, was published in &#;stated that he traveled from left to right, from Marxism to conservatism.
While not incorrect, that characterization ignores the duality of reaction and revolution in Genovese&#;#;s thought, the conservative impulses that ran through his radicalism even at its high point, and the consistencies that underlay a life that began in the Communist Party and ended in the GOP.
In his approach to history, morality and politics, Genovese&#;#;s story bears comparison to a classical tragedy in which a strength becomes the grund for a hero&#;#;s unravelling. His radicalism was founded upon motstånd to bourgeois culture, making possible a subsequent reactionary politics also founded ostensibly upon motstånd to bourgeois culture, even as it put hi
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Eugene Genovese’s scholarship made an enormous difference despite the challenges that he faced. As a self-proclaimed Marxist, he had to make his way through an unreceptive professional discipline – history – in a country still feeling the effects of McCarthyism, and he took on one of the central areas of historical interpretation, the coming and significance of the Civil War. What got him a hearing and then the notice of distinguished historians like C. Vann Woodward and David Potter was the breadth of his research, the clarity of his arguments, and the respect he paid to intellectual adversaries (sometimes more than they deserved). At a time when most scholars thought the debates over the Civil War had largely been resolved and a “consensus” interpretation reigned supreme, Genovese wrote of a fundamental, and revolutionary, battle between two different and increasingly antagonistic societies: a bourgeois North and a pre-capitalist South. In a series of immensely influential books –
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The project of cataloging the book collection of the late Eugene D. Genovese, internationally known historian of the South and slavery, is getting closer to completion at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI). In his will, Genovese, who died on September 26, , at age 82, bequeathed a substantial portion of his personal library to the AHI. Fundraising and construction of a reading room to be named after Genovese and his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (d. ), a prominent public intellectual in her own right, began shortly after the announcement. Since the arrival of the books in , efforts have continued apace to catalog the collection, described by AHI Executive Director Robert Paquette as, “a treasure trove, which includes not only Genovese’s marginalia, but even correspondence stuffed between pages of some books.”
Both Genovese and his wife served as charter members of the AHI’s board of academic advisers. They mentored two of the AHI’s co-fou