Dennis Genovese Popular Books

Dennis Genovese Biography & Facts

Eugene Dominic Genovese (May 19, 1930 – September 26, 2012) was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He was noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the left and Marxism and embraced traditionalist conservatism. He wrote during the Cold War and his political beliefs were viewed by some as highly controversial at the time. Early life and education Genovese was born on May 19, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York. His father was an immigrant dockworker and Eugene was raised in a working-class Italian American family. In 1945, at the age of 15, he joined the Communist Party USA, and was active in the youth movement until he was expelled in 1950, at the age of 20, for disregarding party discipline or, as he said, "for having zigged when [he] was supposed to zag." He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Brooklyn College in 1953 and his Master of Arts in 1955 and a Ph.D. in history in 1959, both from Columbia University. He taught at another dozen universities, including Yale, Cambridge and Rutgers. He was later discharged from army service for his communist leanings. Career Genovese first taught at Brooklyn's Polytechnic Institute from 1958 to 1963. During the early years of the Vietnam War, when there was a growing range of opinions about the war and the Civil Rights Movement, he was a controversial figure as a history professor at Rutgers University (1963–67), and at the University of Rochester (1969–86), where he was elected chairman of the Department of History. From 1986, Genovese taught part-time at the College of William and Mary, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Georgia, Emory University and Georgia State University. He was an editor of Studies on the Left and Marxist Perspectives. He was famous for his disputes with colleagues left, right and center. Defeating Oscar Handlin in 1978, he was elected as the first Marxist president of the Organization of American Historians. In 1998, after moving to the political right in his thinking, Genovese founded The Historical Society, with the goal of bringing together historians united by a traditional methodology. Controversy during the Vietnam war At an April 23, 1965, teach-in at Rutgers University where he was teaching, Genovese stated, "Those of you who know me know that I am a Marxist and a Socialist. Therefore, unlike most of my distinguished colleagues here this morning, I do not fear or regret the impending Viet Cong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it." This comment was widely reported and generated a backlash of criticism. Politicians questioned Genovese's judgment and sensitivity to the responsibility inherent in being a Rutgers professor. Richard M. Nixon, then out of office and living in New York, denounced him, and the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey, Wayne Dumont, challenging Governor Richard J. Hughes, used Genovese's statement as a campaign issue, demanding that Hughes dismiss Genovese from the state university. Bumper stickers saying "Rid Rutgers of Reds" popped up on cars across the state. Genovese insisted that he did not mean to say that he hoped American servicemen would be killed. No state laws or university regulations had been broken, and Genovese was supported by fellow faculty members on grounds of academic freedom. He was not dismissed from his teaching position. Rutgers President Mason Gross refused to re-examine the university's position, and Dumont lost to Governor Hughes. President Gross' defense of academic freedom was honored by the American Association of University Professors, who presented him and Rutgers with its Alexander Meiklejohn Award in 1966. Genovese moved to Canada and taught at Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967–69). In 1968, Genovese signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. At the 1969 convention of the American Historical Association, radical historians Staughton Lynd and Arthur Waskow, speaking on behalf of the Radical Caucus, introduced and later withdrew a resolution demanding an end to not only to the war in Vietnam but also to an “immediate end of all harassment of the Black Panther Party”. A substitute resolution introduced by the radical scholar Blanche W. Cook "deplored and condemned" the war and urged withdrawal of all American troops. It was Cook's resolution that eventually came to a vote. During the discussion on the resolution, Genovese gave a speech, saying that although he opposed the Vietnam war, if the radicals' resolution passed, the bulk of historians in the AHA, who favored the war, would be forced to resign from the group. Noting that the majority of Americans also supported the war, Genovese said that those citizens were as moral and deserving of being heard as the war's opponents. The Radical Caucus, he said, were a bunch of "totalitarians." Genovese ended his speech by saying that the time had come for historians to isolate and defeat the New Left and "put them down, put them down hard, once and for all." When the vote was finally taken, the resolution lost, 647 to 611. Slavery studies In 1968, Genovese wrote a critical historiography of the major studies of slavery in the Americas from a hemispheric perspective. He considered the demand by Marxist anthropologist Marvin Harris in The Nature of Cultural Things (1964) for a materialist alternative to the idealistic framework of Frank Tannenbaum, Stanley Elkins, Gilberto Freyre, and others. Tannenbaum had first introduced the hemispheric perspective by showing that the current status of blacks in various societies of the Western Hemisphere had roots in the attitude toward the black as a slave, which reflected the total religious, legal, and moral history of the enslaving whites. Tannenbaum ignored the material foundations of slave society, most particularly class relations. Later students have qualified his perspectives but have worked within the framework of an "idealistic" interpretation. Harris, on the other hand, insisted that material conditions determined social relations and necessarily prevailed over counter-tendencies in the historical tradition. Harris' work revealed him to be an economic determinist and, as such, ahistorical. By attempting to construct a materialism that bypassed ideological and psychological elements in the formation of social classes, he passed into a "variant of vulgar Marxism" and offered only soulless mechanism. In the 1960s, Genovese in his Marxist stage depicted the masters of the slaves as part of a "seigneurial" society that was anti-modern, pre-bourgeois and pre-capitalist. In 1970, Stampp reviewing Genovese's The World the Slaveholders Made (1969) found fault with the quantity and quality of the evidence used to support the book's arguments. He.... Discover the Dennis Genovese popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Dennis Genovese books.