Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Peace, Tom

21
© Left History
15.1 (Fall/Winter 2010-2011)
The Call of Passive History
Thomas Peace - York University
Since its inception, I have had a somewhat uneasy relationship with
Active History. Don’t get me wrong, I have been a fairly strong supporter of both
the Active History conference and the website that spun out of it. But since Lisa
Helps, Victoria Freeman, Jim Clifford and I began planning the conference, Active
History: A History for the Future, I’ve met with a number of people with signifi-
cant and important concerns about how these projects have been conceived and
what we claim to be doing. It’s not so much the ideas behind Active History that
I have struggled with as much as the name and the belief that Active History
marks the beginning of a new type of history or new way of doing history. These
are valid concerns and have helped to develop my sense of what Active History is
and where it fits in the historiographical cannon.
Just after we started planning the confe rence a friend of m i n e
approached me and asked me to define Active History. After telling her that
Active History is about exploring the ways that historians and communities engage
with each other, she asked a much more haunting question: “So if there are Active
Historians, who are the passive historians?”
The question startled me, because I had not considered that the name
‘Active History’ might imply to some that there is some form of passive history.
At the time, I – like my friend – could not conceive of a passive type of history.
Doesn’t all history, both good and bad, require research, thought, and reaction?
There may be armchair historians, but these people often have fairly clear political
agendas and often fairly loud voices – hardly the traits of a passive historian. I
also wouldn’t describe any of my colleagues as passive historians, nor can I think
of anyone working in a history-related field that fits into this category. But as I
spent more time thinking about this question I realized that there is such a thing
as passive history – and it relates directly to Active History.
One of the principle challenges facing historians is that the past is acces-
sible to everyone. Unlike other professions and trades, such as law, medicine or
pattern-making, which are restricted by knowledge, skill and ability, everybody
shapes and creates their own versions of history with varying degrees of profes-
sional help. Examples of this abound. Individuals and communities are shaped
by personal experience, family history, local and national folklore and myth, and
historical research. Although some people - often amateur historians or genealo-
gists - take a more engaged approach to the past, many people learn history pas-
sively through television programming, visiting historic sites on summer vacations,
or from family story-telling. From these narratives we construct our place in the
world and the ways in which we think it can be shaped.
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This is passive history. It is a sense of the past that is acquired through
minimal effort – though sometimes with the help of professional historians and
officially sanctioned historic sites. It informs our decisions, behaviour and world-
view. Passive history does not mean that the production of historical interpreta-
tion is haphazard or sloppily put together, nor does it discount the deep sense of
meaning that many people get from the past. The term refers more to how peo-
ple receive historical information, rather than how it is produced. Passive history
is not intentionally learned, but instead acquired while engaged in other sorts of
activities, or it is learned through a framework that conforms to a person’s pre-
existing understanding of the world. In other words, it is a supportive rather than
a transformative way of consuming history. Another way to think about it would
be to see passive history as a way of using the past rather than thinking with the past
or thinking historically.
Although I did not realize it at the time my friend asked the question,
Active History is a response to this type of passive history. Both Active History:
A History for the Future and ActiveHistory.ca, the website that we created once
the conference was over, respond to the reality that many people – who value his-
tory, or might value history – have neither the time nor energy to learn history in
the ways that it is taught in high schools and universities (through the academic
monograph and lecture) or even through many public history sites. In a 1998 sur-
vey of how Americans engage with the past, Roy Rosenweig and David Thelan
found that many of their respondents claimed an interest in learning history, but
that most chose to shape their own histories rather than embrace the interpreta-
tions of professional historians and history teachers.1 Most of their respondents
focused on personal aspects of the past, particularly centred on the family, rather
than on larger or more abstract themes.2 Rather than being merely passive
observers of the past, however, these people actively engaged with the past in ways
that helped them shape their present and future.3 In my mind, Active Historians
seek to research and present the past in ways that help people to incorporate a
broader context into their more local family and community histories.
What comes across clearly in Rosenweig and Thelan’s research is that
many people engage with the work of historians sceptically and for some - 5.2%
of respondents - academic historians are almost completely without credibility.4
Without abandoning the rigour that marks historical study, Active History seeks to
engage with people and communities on their own terms. In an effort to restore
that trust, the ideas behind Active History are centred on respecting the different
ways that people have learned about the past, while seeking to also engage with
their historical interpretations in a constructive manner. Ultimately, Active
Historians are those historians who seek to engage and shape passive history, and
similar uses of the past, in ways that help to reflect the high quality work and analy-
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sis being produced by amateur and professional historians in the archives.
Active History has been practiced for a long time and is perhaps best
manifest through politically engaged historians (of which there is no shortage).
Labour, Gender and Oral History have perhaps seen some of the strongest man-
ifestations of an Active History approach. We think of the work of Mary Beard
and Charles Beard, or more recently E.P. Thompson, Natalie Zemon Davies, and
Howard Zinn. In Canada the work of Craig Heron, Jennifer S.H. Brown and Joy
Parr, among many others, have shaped a more active approach to studying the
past. Active History was alive and well long before we used the label to encapsu-
late these ideas.
It is no coincidence that Active History has emerged in Canada at the
height of these scholars’ careers. Rather than being something new, Active
History marks the parallel development of a number of historiographical trends.
It is one representation of the coming together of similar ideas that have been dis-
cussed for decades in many and diverse sub-disciplines of history. Active History,
as a concept, seeks to provide a forum, context and platform through which uni-
versity-based and non-university-based historians, archaeologists and genealogists,
among many others, can discuss the ways in which their research, methodologies
and ways of communicating their results intersect.
Active History: A History for the Future and ActiveHistory.ca are just
two small projects that are part of this wider trend. In Canada there have been
many recent developments that have pursued similar goals. Concordia’s ‘Sharing
Authority’ conference in 2008 brought together scholars from around the world to
discuss collaboration between communities and researchers doing oral history
projects. The Canadians and their Pasts project – which shares many similarities
with Rosenweig and Thelan’s work – is less focused on the way that historians
engage with the public, than on the historical consciousness of the public and the
more passive ways that people engage with the past. Most recently the program
from the 2010 annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, which
focused on storytelling, reveals the wealth and diversity of historians working on
topics which could be labelled as Active History and panels focused on similar
themes.
Jocelyn Létourneau’s A History for the Future: Rewriting Memory and Identity
in Québec and John Tosh’s Why History Matters have encapsulated this growing inter-
est in carrying out this type of history. Both books probe the way that history
helps to situate us in the present and plan for the future. Létourneau’s work
explores the way that the past has been interpreted in Quebec, suggesting that
much of the historiography on Québec has been shaped by visions for the
province’s future. He argues that instead of limiting this future, historians should
seek to be bearers of hope, who “through their work of writing the past as histo-
ry... must strive to open the future as wide as possible.”5 Tosh makes a similar
argument in a much less theoretical, and much more concrete, manner. His book
The Call of Passive History 23
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argues that an engaged citizenry requires a critical understanding of the past. The
book stresses that a critical citizenship shares many similarities with historical
inquiry: “Identifying what is distinctive about the present, enlarging our awareness
of the possibilities inherent in the present, and situating the present in the process-
es which link it with the past and the future.”6 For both historians, the central
point is that the role of history is to serve the present while looking towards the
future.
These books both address the problem and challenge of passive history.
Tosh well summarized common critiques of the heritage industry which focus on
the way that many people (passively) learn history at popular heritage sites: “Many
of our most popular heritage sites encourage a view of the past which is superfi-
cial, nostalgic and conformist; they are not so much a means of education as an
adjunct to tourism.”7 Engaging with the past in this way assimilates the past to the
present eroding the difference brought about by the passage of time.8 This is
often how historians envision passive (and often very bad) history. The point spin-
ning out of this, though, is not that heritage sites are more for tourism than edu-
cation. Instead, it is the realization that experience and place are two important
ways that people engage with the past.9 Too often historians fail to capitalize on
this way of relating to the past; we miss opportunities to challenge the public to
engage with the past.
I do not know of an historian whose practice serves as a better example
of how to seize these opportunities than Joy Parr. From her early work in The
Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns 1880-1950
where she both researched and worked in the industries and communities she
studied to her more recent work with the Walkerton Inquiry on tainted water, she
has taken a unique path which has navigated between respect for the people and
communities which she studies and historical rigour. The Megaprojects New
Media project, which she led with Jon van der Veen and Jessica van Horssen,
serves as a model of engaged public history. The project’s website presents the
stories of six different megaprojects in Canadian history and the way that they
were experienced by the people living around them. It engages people by drawing
on different ways of understanding and learning the stories of these communities.
The story of Asbestos, QC is told through a graphic novel narrated by the mine,
whereas the story of the Bruce Nuclear Power Plant is told through oral inter-
views, and the story of Iroquois, QC through a street tour.
Parr’s work, particularly The Gender of Breadwinners and her recently pub-
lished Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 weaves
together the disparate loose ends of passive and active history. By focusing on
how people make sense of the world, and particularly how these experiences are
embodied, her work resonates with the early Annaliste idea of the ‘dirty hands’
approach to history whereby historical insight is gained through both research and
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direct experience in the field.10 At the heart of her research lie the people with
whom she is working, forcing her to engage with their ideas about the past and
their -and her-place in the world.
I experienced some of the ideas that Parr has put into words and prac-
tice while living in L’Arche. L’Arche communities are places where people with
varying gifts and abilities build relationships with each other by living together in
community. At the heart of L’Arche are men and women with intellectual disabil-
ities, known as core members because of their central role in the community. One
of the activities common to many L’Arche communities is the tradition of build-
ing life-story books. These books tell the story of core members’ lives through
photographs, letters, and news clippings of events that are important to that per-
son. Many core members have difficulty expressing their desires verbally and need
some assistance constructing their life-story books. An assistant, or a friend, will
usually help construct the book with them. These people will actively listen, ask
questions, and make suggestions to help the core member shape the vision for
their book, as well as help to collect content that will be meaningful for the core
member. Even though this material is often not textual, through the images and
mementos broader themes become apparent. A life-story book almost always
weaves the larger stories of the community and society into the person’s personal
narrative. In linking personal stories to their broader context, the relationship
between the core member and the people involved in these projects is important.
It involves trust, open communication, and a willingness to be vulnerable with
each other.
This is the heart of Active History and what ultimately drew me into this
project. It is the idea that historians need to connect with the people on whom,
for whom, and with whom they are working, engage with their vision of the past
and provide the tools, resources and information for which an even greater and
deeper understanding of history can be developed. This is a two-way process
through which both the historian and the people in the community being studied
have something to give and something to gain. It is not without risk, either.
Pressures of time, particularly when trying to complete a dissertation, distance,
other commitments, and thoughtless words all shape the dynamics of these rela-
tionships. But rarely, if ever, is Active History – or Active historians – perfect.
Rather, Active History is an ideal. It is a process and experience through which
historians place themselves in a place of vulnerability, seeking to engage with the
people whose history they research and write, learning from them and asking for-
giveness when they make mistakes, providing a deeper sense of the past and its
context.
It is in this sense that Active History is a type of political action more
than a single political stance, statement or perspective. Active History confronts
and challenges passive history, which in Canada has ignored some of the darker –
but important, and often central – aspects of the past in favour of a more nation-
The Call of Passive History 25
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alist and conformist narrative. In responding to, and engaging with, passive histo-
ry, Active History seeks to better contextualize and situate the way that the past is
envisioned. Like some of the historians I listed above, it is about embodying and
employing the principals that governed many of the historiographical shifts of the
1960s and 1970s in our research, writing and dissemination. Again, rather than re-
inventing the wheel, Active History is an attempt to reinforce these ideas in an
effort to promote a deeper public understanding of, and engagement with, the
past.
NOTES
1 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelan, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life,
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 177-178.
2 Rosenzweig and Thelan, 21. The exception to this is when personal experience and the experience
of larger groups coincide – this is often linked to racism and other forms of discrimination. See 22
and chap. 6.
3 Rosenzweig and Thelan, chap. 3.
4 Rosenzweig and Thelan, 91. Percentages can sometimes be deceiving. If Canadians share similar
attributes to the Americans in this study. There are around 1.7 million people who are relatively
sceptical of the work that we do.
5 Jocelyn Létourneau, A History for the Future: Rewriting Memory and Identity in Quebec, (Montreal-
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 27.
6 John Tosh, Why History Matters, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 7.
7 Tosh, 11.
8 Tosh, 11-12.
9 Rosenzweig and Thelan, chap. 4.
10 Paul R. Spickard, Kevin M. Cragg and James V. Spickard used this term to encapsulate the
research and writing of Marc Bloch in their historiographical survey, World History by the world’s histori -
ans, (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 504.
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The Call of Passive History

Heron, Craig

47
© Left History
15.1 (Fall/Winter 2010-2011)
“Workers of the World, Give Me a Call!”
Craig Heron - York University
Being an “active” historian can take many forms. Some of us send off
letters to the editor. Some carry placards in demonstrations about issues that upset
us. Some write affidavits for important court cases or carry our knowledge before
government commissions. Some write speeches for prime ministers. Over the
past quarter century, many of us have tried to rethink what it means to be a histo-
rian from the inside out, and have tried to develop ways of thinking, writing, and
acting that connect us with issues of social justice and the movements behind
them.
I was an activist before I was a historian. As an undergraduate History
student at the University of Toronto in the late 1960s, I defied my upbringing in
conservative working-class Scarborough by being drawn into radical student poli-
tics and identifying with the emerging New Left in Toronto. I embraced a set of
principles and values that, broadly speaking, have shaped my political thinking ever
since. It was a form of politics that was ultra-democratic, anti-authoritarian, egal-
itarian, and communitarian. At some point in the 1970s it became heavily influ-
enced by feminism.
I was a “radical” - the word we all used in those heady days to label our
diffuse, multifaceted politics. In practice that meant that I identified with groups
that I believed were exploited and oppressed and looked forward to fundamental
structural changes in their situations. Besides agitating for a more democratically
run university, working on radical education projects, and marching in countless
demonstrations, I thought I should be supporting the struggles of working peo-
ple, and I started to walk picket lines in some of the most high-profile strikes.
Indeed, I recall starting my first classes in the MA program at the University of
Toronto in 1971 in a somewhat bleary-eyed state, having been up before the sun
to get to a picket line at the Texpac plant out in Brantford.
My understanding of the importance of the working class to political
struggle was fairly abstract, and had not come from discussions at my family’s din-
ner table. But I did become more sharply aware of class distinctions as I spent my
summers working in factories while my middle-class university friends headed off
to Europe. That means that I can remember the political exhilaration of working
in the infamous Canadian Johns-Mansville asbestos plant in Scarborough and
reading the leading American radical magazine, Ramparts, on my coffee breaks.
When I finally decided that I might like to become a historian in 1975
(after some time outside the university), I brought along all this political baggage
and had plenty of skepticism about academia. I was critical of the elitism of pro-
fessional life that insisted on unnecessarily rigid hierarchies between graduate stu-
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dents and faculty, between support staff and academics, and between administra-
tors and everybody else. I was critical of overly authoritarian pedagogy, and pre-
ferred a more student-centered approach. I was concerned about the under-rep-
resentation of women and minorities in the university and in the historical profes-
sion itself. And, of course, as a graduate student staking out a research project, I
was critical of how the writing of Canadian history had ignored or dismissed the
experiences of women, minority groups, and, above all from my perspective,
workers. I was going to uncover the as-yet undiscovered story of the Canadian
working class in the early twentieth century. I was not content to stay within the
narrow frameworks of conventional historical writing, and was much more open
to perspectives from other disciplines than I thought my senior colleagues were.
My youthful political formation also encouraged me to try to break down
the isolation of academia, to build bridges to the outside world and make my
workplace more relevant to the mass of the Canadian population. So I tried to
design assignments for my students that would encourage them to apply some of
the insights they were gleaning in my classes to the real world, in particular through
oral history projects. I also thought it was important to find a variety of voices for
communicating the insights of my research to different audiences. So even while
working on my dissertation, I wrote articles for union newspapers and a script for
an NFB sound-filmstrip on child labour, I spoke to non-academic conferences and
workshops, and I helped to produce a full-length pictorial history of the Hamilton
working class. In my first years of teaching, I also worked with the Ontario
Museum Association and the Toronto Board of Education’s Labour Education
Committee to find ways to bring the emerging scholarship in Canadian labour his-
tory to children and the general public.
I need to emphasize, however, that my criticisms of academia and elitist
professionalism did not lead me to reject or abandon some basic professional stan-
dards. I was committed to careful, exhaustive research that could meet the high-
est standards of scholarly excellence. I wanted to see rigorous discussion and
debate about empirical detail, methodology, and theory, and believed it was impor-
tant to engage in critical interventions within the profession to begin to shift par-
adigms of historical thinking (which of course meant participating fully in con-
tributing to and organizing conferences, writing provocative review articles, and so
on - a major commitment of time and energy that soon drew me away from some
of the older venues of activism).
I expected a lot from myself, my students, and my colleagues. I thought
(and still do think) that it was possible to be rigorous and demanding without
being arrogant and pretentious. Being informal, friendly, and supportive does not
have to mean being intellectually lazy. And I believed that, as a serious profession-
al, I was developing an expertise that gave me a right to be heard. Since I was also
looking outward from the university, I was expecting to be able to apply my expert-
ise in democratic ways, in settings beyond academic conferences and seminars, but
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also to be respected for what I knew about history.
Fortunately, I was not alone in these proclivities. As a graduate student,
I had been lucky to be doing a doctorate at Dalhousie where a good number of
faculty and graduate students shared my views about how to do history and be a
historian. By that point there were larger beachheads within the Canadian histor-
ical profession where these ideas and practices were also taking hold - the
Canadian Committee on Women’s History, the Canadian Committee on Labour
History, and so on, as well as an interdisciplinary grouping known as the Political
Economy Network, all of whom held sessions at the Learned Societies meetings
each year. I also discovered when I began teaching at York in 1982 that I had
arrived at an institution with more radicals per square inch than anywhere else in
the country. That was not so true in the History Department as I found it in the
1980s, however. My willingness back then to honour the picket lines of secretaries
and part-time instructors and then to go out on strike myself along with the rest
of the York University Faculty Association set me apart from most of my col-
leagues - a sharp contrast, I should add, with what happened in 1997 and 2000 dur-
ing even bigger labour disruptions at York, when most History Department facul-
ty did not try to teach and often walked the picket lines.
So, in the 1980s, I soon found that my most important intellectual
growth was taking place not in the History Department, but in discussion groups
set up informally outside the structures of the university, with young equally radi-
calized academics - in my case, an industrial relations group, a Marxist history
group, much later a masculinities history group, and, by far the most important, a
group of sociologists, historians, and scattering of economists and legal scholars,
which is still meeting today after more than a quarter of a century as the Toronto
Labour Studies Group (through which more than fifty people have passed over the
years).
So it was with this peculiar political and professional formation that I
began to devote more energy to working outside the university with the labour
movement. In 1988 I coordinated what turned out to be the last in a series of
biennial conferences started in the 1970s to bring together academics from many
disciplines and labour activists in the hopes of sharing insights. It was originally
called the Blue-Collar Work Conference (informally dubbed the Blue Denim
Conference as a result of the attire that academics typically sported), and then,
under the weight of feminist criticism, it was renamed the Workers and Their
Communities Conference. It was intended to give academics working on topics in
labour studies in various disciplines an opportunity to talk to each other and, more
importantly, to bring into the discussions labour activists and people from other
closely allied social movements - feminists, environmentalists, housing activists,
cultural workers, and so on. Sometimes it worked, but more often it was an embar-
rassingly lopsided event with relatively few working-class voices participating. A
few years later, I convinced the Canadian Committee on Labour History to begin
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holding a workshop each year just before the regular meetings of the Canadian
Historical Association to bring together labour historians with union and commu-
nity activists in day-long discussions and cultural events - a generally much more
successful experience that continues to the present.
A month after the end of the last Workers and Their Communities
Conference, in the early summer of 1988, I attended what was ultimately a much
more important meeting, the first in what was to become, for me, fifteen years of
meetings to launch a new institution devoted to the history and culture of work-
ing people. This new project brought together a remarkable mixture of people
from the labour movement, public and popular education, archives work, arts pro-
duction, and academia. We called it the Ontario Workers’ Arts and Heritage
Centre (the Ontario part of the title was dropped about 2002 – hence the acronym
WAHC). In the early 1990s we managed to get some grudging support from the
new NDP government at Queen’s Park to buy and renovate a handsome old build-
ing in Hamilton, which opened to the public late in 1996. From the beginning the
Ontario Federation of Labour appointed three members of the board, and had a
rarely acknowledged senior status among us (much as the labour movement did in
the many other coalitions of social groups it was joining in the 1980s and 1990s).
This project ran on a shoe-string, with a ridiculously small budget and no
staff until late in 1995, and even then nowhere near enough for the scope of our
ambitions. So the board members not only debated broad policy and lobbied
politicians for funding, but also did much of the hands-on work in running the
centre. I wrote many grant applications, spoke to countless audiences, tacked pic-
tures to walls, stacked chairs, served drinks, and much more. I also curated five
exhibits and worked as a historical consultant on several more, as did other aca-
demics (notably Franca Iacovetta, Ken Cruikshank, Nancy Bouchier, Richard
Harris, Wayne Lewchuk, and Robert Storey). I have written a long article about
much of this experience (in Labour/Le Travail, Spring 2000), so I won’t go into
much detail about the process - just a few highlights.
First, what was I trying to do in this project?   I saw this work as part of
popular history, as a way to convey the insights of the academic scholarship of
labour historians to larger audiences, particularly the people whose experience was
presented in that scholarship, in the hope that they could use this knowledge for
their own collective purposes. That of course meant having to think about differ-
ent modes of communication than academic writing or classroom lectures, and
made me much more conscious of the use of artifacts, visual material, and three-
dimensional space, for which my professional training as a historian had not
equipped me at all. This kind of work did not do much to deepen my historical
understanding of particular topics or issues, but it did change the way I think
about history, especially the visual and spatial dimensions.
For academics accustomed to being authoritative voices, this kind of
political engagement was largely unfamiliar. Our challenge was two-fold - to learn
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to listen and cooperate with other activists with similar goals, not simply to impose
our academic knowledge; and yet, at the same time, to find ways to have our
expertise taken seriously at the table of discussion and planning. I saw my work
at WAHC as helping to preserve and promote the historical experience of work-
ing people and the organizations they had created to advance and protect their
interests and concerns, particularly their unions. In Hamilton at several points it
was certainly clear that our efforts gave local unionists a stronger sense that their
current struggles had a long history. That required putting more of the accent on
their pride, determination, and success - an upbeat, hopeful story to counterbal-
ance the neglect and disparagement that had been heaped on workers. It was hard-
er to turn the spotlight on the failures or on such less attractive behaviour as
racism, sexism, bureaucratization, or red-baiting. To be fair, it was possible to
insert some of these critical dimensions into the mix of exhibitions, mainly
because there are voices inside the labour movement raising these concerns. But,
repeatedly I had to get used to adapting my training in history to the uses of her-
itage, which involves much more celebration, veneration, and myth-making than
many hard-boiled historians are normally willing to accept. In this case, carrying
my expertise into such settings was to contribute to a larger culture of resistance
that had to be negotiated with people from very different backgrounds.
So how did those people think about historians like me and the work we
do?  There is a small, but encouraging core of unionists who love labour-history.
But many activists in the labour movement and other social movements have little
interest in or patience with history. Many unionists are also cavalier about preserv-
ing their historical records (a year ago the Canadian Labour Congress turfed out
many boxes of files when they moved to new offices without bothering to ask any
of us what should be saved and archived). Most often labour activists want histo-
ry to provide straightforward lessons from the past, and to reaffirm the stories that
circulate among them. I have had, for example, a devil of a time trying to get
labour people to accept that the creation of Labour Day in 1894 was not a capi-
talist plot in response to the more radical May Day. It was also hard to get unions
to put their money where their mouths were. For many years, WAHC’s experience
was that the labour movement ritually would proclaim its support for labour his-
tory, but when it came to funding projects, the money often was not there (fortu-
nately there has recently been a significant increase in financial support).
How they have viewed us, as opposed to our scholarship, is more com-
plicated. I think we are respected, but not entirely trusted. They like to hear us as
public intellectuals talking to the media with labour-positive messages, and they
have seemed willing to tag along somewhat passively on the arts and heritage proj-
ects we set in motion. But, among many workers, there is a perfectly understand-
able discomfort with people coming out of the university environment. Unionists
can sense a sharp class difference. Back in the 1980s I was introduced to the chair
of the Education Committee of the steelworkers’ union local at Stelco in
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Hamilton, who bluntly said: “I know you professors - you either want to study us
or change us,” and walked away without shaking my hand. There is also a resid-
ual problem from the Cold War, when Canadian unions pulled all their education-
al work inside their own organizations and wanted to keep tight control over it.
They are cautious about working with free-floating intellectuals outside their
offices. So in 1999-2000 the CLC put together their own Millennium project with
no significant input from those of us who had been working in the area for a long
time. And more recently a traveling exhibit on the history of working women was
put together with no help from the many scholars in that field who could have
contributed. Perhaps most important, beyond the leadership level, workers have
not flocked in large numbers to labour heritage events and programs (in 2007, for
example, WAHC launched a new permanent exhibit on Hamilton labour history
and got only a handful of people turning up). We are probably too earnest and
too didactic for most working-class tastes. Whatever the explanation, it is certain-
ly frustrating to have to put up with so many digs about irrelevant academics from
a broad range of progressive people.
So I can report that my efforts to do “active” history have in some small
ways contributed to changing the content and practices of the historical profes-
sion in Canada, and that the ongoing work being done out of the old Custom
House in Hamilton by WAHC’s staff, board, and volunteers has made some con-
siderable difference. Yet on reflection the interaction of the two spheres of activ-
ity has been far more difficult than I imagined. In particular, I think that many of
us who, with missionary zeal, carried our agenda of public education outside the
university discovered that there is quite limited interest in it. We often framed our
projects in ways that did not always resonate with the groups we hoped to work
with, and our professionalism, however radicalized, could prove to be an obstacle
to easy working relationships with those groups. As a historian of alcohol con-
sumption, I find that sobering.
Heron52
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"Workers of the World, Give Me a Call!"

Palmer, Bryan D.

169
© Left History
15.1 (Fall/Winter 2010-2011)
The Democratic Revolutionary: Reviving Lenin
Bryan D. Palmer – Trent University
Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Revolution, Democracy, Socialism (London: Pluto
Press, 2008)
Lenin isn’t much liked these days. Not that, in certain circles, he ever was.
But the prejudice animating much anti-Leninism today, with the revolutionary left
in decline and disarray, is perhaps one reason why the current capitalist downturn
is not being effectively challenged. The crisis of humanity, Trotsky wrote in the
1930s, with Lenin’s legacy in tatters within the now no-longer revolutionary Soviet
Union, is not inseparable from the crisis in the leadership of the international
workers’ movement. For all the antagonism to Lenin, his contribution to the liv-
ing body of revolutionary thought is undeniably immense.
With the implosion of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of
Stalinist ‘actually existing socialism,’ there has been a tendency among many left
activists and academics to collapse Leninism into Stalinism. Stress is placed on
Lenin’s ostensible brutality in suppressing opposition during the years of War
Communism immediately following the consolidation of the 1917 Revolution.
Such an interpretation, of course, has long been a staple of the anti-communist
forces of the right and the social-democratic and anarchist left. The notion that
terror was a fundamental feature of Bolshevism, whether led by Lenin and Trotsky
or, later, by Stalin, is an old one. The indiscriminate lumping of Lenin and Stalin
into an unappetizing sameness, while always a part of the conventional wisdom of
the mainstream, is nonetheless wrong-headed, both intellectually and politically.
Paul Le Blanc is well-situated to counter this interpretive and political
dead-end. A lifelong socialist, with years of active struggle in the revolutionary left
under his belt, and a prolific scholar whose published works include a history of
the American working class and a sophisticated discussion of Lenin and the
nature, meaning, and importance of the revolutionary party, Le Blanc is both a
thinker and doer, a versatile leftist animated by a non-dogmatic antagonism to cap-
italism’s acquisitive individualism and resolute repudiation of its imperialist aggres-
sions. His Lenin: Revolution, Democracy, Socialism is a direct challenge to those who
would equate Lenin and Stalin. The book resurrects the revolutionary, socialist,
and democratic Lenin, and it does so convincingly and with impressive learned-
ness.
Indeed, there is almost certainly no better short introduction to Lenin,
through his own words, than this rigorously disciplined anthology. For those
unable to wade through all 45 volumes of Lenin’s collected works, Le Blanc has
assembled key writings on pivotal themes, abridging the original texts expertly so
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Palmer170
as to make them and their political points more accessible. In addition, Le Blanc
provides an impressive introduction to Lenin, outlining his historical development
in a brief but insightful biography, and contextualizes the selection of Lenin’s writ-
ing in introductions that also reference major works of relevance. Set against the
cavalier social construction of Lenin so prominent in the dismissive caricatures of
many commentators, past and present, Le Blanc’s text is refreshingly fair-minded,
embodying criticism and acknowledging error in Lenin’s experience, all the while
accenting his overall achievement in charting a revolutionary course for Russian
Marxists and subsequent generations committed to the revolutionary ideal. In
both its politics and its scholarship, Le Blanc’s Lenin sets a standard for the discus-
sion of its subject that, in different ways, parallels the rich and detailed excavation
of Lenin and his pamphlet What Is To Be Done? in Lars T. Lih’s monumental Lenin
Rediscovered.1
Reading Le Blanc and his Lenin anthology establishes that there is, in
actuality, little to recommend the Lenin = Stalin = totalitarianism equation that is
accepted uncritically by so many, including a good number of self-proclaimed left-
ists. This book is a reminder that those who have turned their backs on the sig-
nificance of what the Bolsheviks accomplished in 1917, and what was lost, from
the mid-1920s on, as this experiment in workers democracy was slowly but surely
extinguished, miss a great deal. They do so in ways that are quite flawed, all the
more so if they insist on equating Lenin and Stalin. Such a perspective relies on a
fundamentally ahistorical congealing of highly different experiences and orienta-
tions, and this suppresses important political issues. A major failing in this reduc-
tionist enterprise is appreciation of the different context in which Lenin reluctant-
ly turned to limited coercive measures to preserve a Revolution under siege, in
contrast to Stalin embracing widespread terror as a fundamental feature of his
regime. Moreover, such a perspective actually diminishes our capacities to grasp
how different were the purposes of Lenin and Stalin. The former never aban-
doned a commitment to internationalism and world revolution, while the latter
turned inward in a parochial defensiveness that spelled the political defeat of the
revolutionary process. Trotsky referred to Stalin as ‘The Great Organizer of
Defeats’ precisely because the politics of ‘socialism in one country’ spelled disas-
ter for the World Revolution. The lives lost in struggles compromised, curtailed,
and worse, from China in the 1920s to Spain in the 1930s to Indonesia in the
1960s, are bloodied proof of this sorry record.
In the first part of his book, Le Blanc provides a succinct biography of
Lenin, who grew up in an educated family. A formative moment in Lenin’s devel-
opment was the arrest and execution of his beloved elder brother, Alexander, who
had been involved in a plot to assassinate the Tsar. Lenin himself became a revo-
lutionary, influenced by the Marxism of Georgi Plekhanov. He studied capitalist
development in the Russian countryside, authoring a major book on the subject in
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Review Essay 171
1899. Driven into exile, Lenin distinguished himself at the time of the 1905
Revolution by insisting that a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the
peasantry” was the necessary foundation of advancing social democracy in Russia.
In the years leading up to World War I, Lenin charted the path of the Bolsheviks
within the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
It was in 1917, however, that Lenin’s capacities of revolutionary leader-
ship were brilliantly revealed: his “April theses” catapulted the Bolsheviks into the
leadership of those forces challenging Kerensky’s Provisional Government; where
others vacillated, Lenin advocated the insurrection that would culminate in a rela-
tively bloodless seizure of power that proclaimed the world’s first workers’ state
under the slogan “all power to the soviets.” More than any other single individual
in the history of modern revolutionary movements, then, Lenin had both seen and
advocated a path to the possibility of building the prerequisites of socialism.
He did this, of course, in the most inauspicious of circumstances. As a
Marxist, Lenin had been schooled in the theory that socialism would emerge out
of the contradictions of advanced, urban capitalist societies, in which the prole-
tariat was the dominant class. Instead, the path to socialism first presented itself
amidst the different contradictions of Russian capitalism, where an unevenly
developed economy was characterized by massive concentrations of capital float-
ing like islands amidst a landed sea of peasant-based rural agrarianism. Lenin also
had to confront not only the internal civil war waged by domestic opponents of
the new regime. He also had to conduct a war on external fronts as well, in which
the necessity of beating back the armies of foreign powers amassed on Russia’s
borders during World War I was complicated by the hostility of global capitalism,
whose nation states betrayed little sympathy for the revolutionary experiment asso-
ciated with Bolshevism’s 1917 victory. To sustain this experiment, Lenin, Trotsky,
and others understood that Revolution must also break out in Europe, most piv-
otally in Germany, for the beginnings of socialism in Russia were too precarious
and weak to survive without new bastions of revolutionary achievement and hope
appearing on the horizon.
No such breakthroughs beyond Russia materialized. Lenin, Trotsky, and
the Bolsheviks were forced into a variety of retrenchments. They struggled to pre-
serve what they could of the gains and aspirations of their 1917 revolution, but
they adopted measures that they themselves would, in better circumstances, cer-
tainly have avoided.
Lenin’s accomplishment was thus also his tragedy. Faced with the con-
crete prospects of taking state power in the name of a future socialism that was in
some sense already compromised by the backward realities of Russia’s complex
political economy, Lenin had no choice but to seize the prospects of the moment.
He could do little more than gamble that revolutionary initiatives elsewhere would
break open the future advance of socialism on more than a limited, national scale.
To have refused to advance the world revolution in Russia when the opportunities
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Palmer172
so obviously presented themselves in 1917, as some of Lenin’s counterparts advo-
cated, would only have further mired the worker-peasant masses in worsening
immiseration and straightjacketed the political possibilities of the country’s pro-
ducers for decades to come. It would also inevitably have weakened the prospects
of the European Revolution. Lenin’s brilliance was his realization that a necessary
daring and defiance of the odds was humanity’s only hope. His failure, over deter-
mined by so many of the objective conditions and developments of his times,
would leave socialism at the mercy of Stalinism’s defeatist distortions, which would
be anything but tender.
Le Blanc’s outline of these developments in his lengthy introduction is
masterful. It provides a patient pedagogical survey of how so many writings on
Lenin, from conservative critics to socialist activists, get their understandings of
Lenin fundamentally wrong. His sardonic list of ten reasons for not reading Lenin
conveys well that those who think the world is as it should be will always find ways
of deriding both the experience of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the figure
who did the most to bring it to fruition. Le Blanc works his way through the main
themes of a wide variety of anti-Leninist writing, pointing out the flaws, contra-
dictions, and myth-making that lay at the core of early, contemporary conservative
and socialist attacks on Lenin, as well as more recent historical and left activist dis-
missals. Against Sheila Rowbotham’s influential socialist-feminist critique of
Leninism as an elevation of the vanguard Party above the self-activity and devel-
opment of broader forces, for instance, Le Blanc provides examples from the his-
tory of United States labour struggles that he claims repudiate a kind of “iron law
of Leninist manipulation.” Cognizant of the complexity of the issues he has
raised, Le Blanc offers an extremely useful guide to further reading for those who
want to explore the controversy over Lenin in more detail.
The substance of this volume, however, is its collection of Lenin state-
ments that further confirm Le Blanc’s view of Lenin as a revolutionary socialist
committed to democratic principles. Le Blanc has adroitly excerpted passages
from Lenin’s voluminous body of writing, organizing these selections in a largely
chronological but also thematic compilation. Understandings of continuity and
progression, as well as historical context, are presented. Chapters of these select-
ed writings are organized around Lenin’s early 1895-1899 concern with Marxist
program and revolutionary organization; the birth of Bolshevism (1900-1904); the
1905 Revolution; the creation of the Bolshevik Party (1906-1914); imperialism,
war, and national liberation (1913-1917); the 1917 Revolution; World Revolution
(1918-1921); and the struggle for socialism and against bureaucracy (1919-1923).
What Le Blanc has done with this ordering and selection of Lenin’s writings is pro-
vide a wonderfully succinct and accessible account of Lenin’s perspectives on the
revolutionary process.
The chapters on Lenin’s attentiveness to the necessity of building a rev-
olutionary party are cogent reminders, in our own age of anti-organizational poli-
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Review Essay 173
tics, that without institutions of revolutionary resolve the challenge to capital is nec-
essarily fundamentally weakened, if not reduced to ephemeral outbursts of
protest, however militant. Lenin’s interpretive insights into socialism, war, and
imperialism, culminating in his 1917 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism, are refreshingly current, an indication of how struggles of a century
ago could animate analysis that remains centrally important to understanding our
own world. The democratic Lenin, a Lenin so many want to deny and bury under
the rubble of unfortunate historical contingency, emerges vibrantly in Le Blanc’s
selections addressing the 1917 Revolution. Arguably Lenin’s most hopeful and
utopian of writings, The State and Revolution was not by accident produced at the
very point that the Bolshevik leader perceived the many problems that were going
to inhibit the state erected to protect workers’ interests and soviet power, turning
it ever against the boundless freedom that was itself the only ultimate guarantor of
‘lasting peace’ and the end of exploitation. Lenin’s 1917 ‘Letters on Tactics’ under-
stood that, “Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.”
Unfortunately for Lenin, his tree of life would see a foliage of problems
in the 1917-1923 years, and through these leaves of difficulty no theory could tri-
umphantly proclaim socialism into being. In the last years of his life, Lenin was
pressured aplenty to adapt to what Le Blanc acknowledges was a “tragic authori-
tarianism.” But he also struggled to keep alive what had been a life-long commit-
ment to revolutionary democracy.
Lenin, a tactician who addressed realities, often offered guidance that
had a certain timeless ring to it: “Control over a bank, the merging of all banks
into one, is not yet socialism,” he wrote in a 1917 Letter on Tactics, “but it is a step
towards socialism.”2 This kind of elementary socialist vocabulary needs to be res-
urrected. So, too, does Lenin’s boundless internationalism, his belief in the tri-
umph of world revolution that alone could abolish the regime of capitalist accu-
mulation premised on the exploitation of the many by the few, a social order des-
tined to reproduce an ongoing orgy of oppression.
With the carnage of global war impressed on the popular mind, Lenin
wrote to the American worker in 1918: “We are now, as it were, in a besieged
fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to
come to relief. These detachments exist, they are more numerous than ours, they are
maturing, growing, gaining more strength the longer the brutalities of imperialism
continue. … Slowly but surely,” Lenin insisted, “the workers are adopting com-
munist, Bolshevik tactics and are marching towards the proletarian revolution,
which alone is capable of saving dying culture and dying mankind.”3
Culture continued to succumb in the years after Lenin’s 1923 death.
Mankind proliferated, but failed to turn back the death march of capital, which
would, in short order, give rise to fascism, yet another world war, the threat of
nuclear holocaust and, in our own times, the scourge of still further imperialist car-
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Palmer174
nage (from Vietnam to Afghanistan) and the unprecedented global reach of eco-
logical destruction. Capitalism, increasingly unable to restrain its appetite for accu-
mulation, has, of late, been precipitated into a free-fall of meltdowns. Yet it has
arguably never been as ideologically secure in its world-wide hegemony.
We desperately need the resurrection and revival of the kind of strategic
thinking and principled commitment that Lenin epitomized in the era of 1917, and
all that it promised. For those interested in this rebirth of the politics of alterna-
tive to capitalism, Paul Le Blanc’s account of the democratic, socialist, and revolu-
tionary Lenin will prove indispensable. Reading it is a reminder that what is, need
not be, and that what has, seemingly, failed, can be reconstituted anew.
NOTES
1 Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context (Leiden: Brill Press, 2006).
2 V.I. Lenin, “Letters on Tactics,” in V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th edition, ed. Bernard Isaacs
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964).
3 V.I. Lenin, “Letter to American Workers,” 20 August 1918, V.I. Lenin Internet Archive, accessed
November 2010, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/20.htm.
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The Democratic Revolutionary: Reviving Lenin

Hammonds, Claire

Left History 15.1194
streetcar movement is distinct from the earlier train and horse-car movements.
This chapter seems out of place as it is, especially since the earlier movements took
place outside the South and speak to the ways in which space on transportation
socially stratified communities more broadly in a national scope. The same could
be said for connecting these streetcar movements on to Rosa Parks in the 1950s.
This is indicative of the weaknesses of the book, when the author moves outside
these three cities and this time, her argument is hard to visualize and connect to
her example cities.
However, the core of the book and the chapters that explain the New
Orleans, Savannah and Richmond movement are exceptional, clear and persuasive.
The author conceives her theory more narrowly than the material deserves how-
ever. Kelley is doing groundbreaking work on these three cities and this move-
ment, but engages some of the more archaic scholarship on race like Meier and
Rudwick rather than Howard N. Rabinowitz, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham and Kevin K. Gaines who all address the intersection of
race, class and gender but outside the confines of streetcars during this time. She
clearly manoeuvres through this scholarship throughout the text, but framing the
introduction and conclusion in these works rather than Meier, Rudwick, W. E. B.
Dubois, James Weldon Johnson and Booker T. Washington would have helped the
reader better understand the theoretical frameworks she engages throughout the
middle chapters. Additionally, the use of the idea citizenship as opposed to “civil
rights” might also confuse readers. Kelley is making a contribution to the history
of African American Civil Rights, a pretty significant contribution, yet she litters
her framework with the jargon of “citizenship” without fleshing out that literature
which seems to include African American Civil Rights history yet is so broad as to
encompass much more than the scope of this study and African American Civil
Rights generally. An explanation of “citizenship” as an idea and its historiography
and how and whether it is different from African American Civil Rights as an
operating paradigm is needed to frame the argument for the reader.
These criticisms are minor distractions from a book that is compelling
and fresh. This book and its argument will be around for a long time and will be
the foundations of future studies of segregation and transportation for years to
come.
Robert Cassanello
University of Central Florida 
Robert R. Korstad and James L. Leloudis, To Right These Wrongs: The
North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in the
1960s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed into legislation the Economic Opportunity Act
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Book Reviews 195
(EOA), setting into action America’s War on Poverty. The EOA sought to address
the roots of poverty through a series of local programs aimed at supporting edu-
cation, job training and development. Historical accounts of this period have
tended to overlook the story of the North Carolina Fund, an antecedent to the
national anti-poverty effort that in many ways served as both its model and test-
ing ground. Established in 1963 by North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford, the
Fund was an effort to address poverty through the creation of locally governed
programs which would rely on direct participation from the poor to address com-
munity issues. In To Right These Wrongs, Korstad and Leloudis offer one of the first
detailed accounts of the Fund and its relationship to the decade’s larger anti-pover-
ty agenda. While the Fund only operated for five years, the authors present an
engaging narrative of transformation as the agency came to understand poverty in
distinctly political terms, adopting a radical strategy that sought to bridge histori-
cal racial divides in organizing the poor to challenge existing relationships of
power. The story of the Fund stands out in a Southern landscape marked by sig-
nificant racial violence and its lessons remain highly applicable to contemporary
attempts to address poverty and inequality.
When Terry Sanford took office in 1961, more than a third of North
Carolina families lived below the poverty line. Sanford sought to address race and
poverty as interrelated issues by circumventing the conservative legislature and
instead appealing directly to private philanthropies to fund an agency that would
empower local communities to address their own issues. Initially the Fund’s
approach was distinctly top-down, relying on existing agencies to distribute fund-
ing. The limitations of this strategy soon became apparent as many of the agen-
cies appeared committed to maintaining the status quo. Fund leaders felt a more
directly democratic vision was needed: one that organized the poor to make
demands on the government. Korstad and Leloudis provide a meticulously docu-
mented account of how the Fund came to reorient itself from an advocacy
approach centered on providing services, to a far more militant activist approach
that embraced conflict as a means to social change. As they trace this transition,
they provide a captivating sense of the possibility and promise felt by the Fund’s
leaders.
One of the most interesting elements of the story, and indeed of the
book, is the role played by the North Carolina Volunteers in shifting the Fund’s
direction. Envisioned as the “foot soldiers in the battle against poverty,” (109) the
Volunteers were a mixed-race group of primarily middle-class college students,
sent out around the state to support the Fund’s community programs. As they
worked and interacted with the poor, many of the volunteers moved from an
understanding of poverty as an individual problem, to one that saw it embedded
in larger structural issues of power. In telling the volunteers’ stories, the authors
really hit their stride, devoting an entire chapter to examining the work. Relying
on diaries and oral histories, the voices of the students themselves provide paral-
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Left History 15.1196
lel narratives of personal and broader social transformations.
During its years of operation the community action programs sponsored
by the Fund were able to translate small scale successes, like organizing local clean-
up projects or challenging a particularly delinquent landlord, into larger efforts that
indeed did challenge the power structure. Much of the book’s analysis of these
events relies on organizational records and interviews with leaders. One conse-
quence of this approach is that we are sometimes unable to see how the partici-
pants themselves understood these events and what sort of lasting mark these
confrontations made. That said, the faces and voices of residents are brought into
sharper focus in a series of moving photographs taken by Billy E. Barnes which
appear throughout the book, as well as in the DVD documentary Change Comes
Knocking which accompanies the book.
The radical approach of the Fund meant that by 1968 when it shut its
doors, the work had begun to come under severe attack from businesses and politi-
cians who complained bitterly about the seemingly partisan nature of the effort.
A major strength of the book is its ability to show the interplay between the local,
state and national contexts as this political drama unfolded. The authors adeptly
demonstrate how national debates came into play with conservative powers in the
state and the stark reality of poverty and racial tension on the ground. While the
Fund ultimately failed to realize its grand anti-poverty goals, its work created a net-
work of community agencies that still exists in North Carolina. Moreover, the
story and lessons of the Fund make this an important book for those interested
in understanding the process of social change, and the power and corresponding
threat posed by organizing the poor to demand the nation fulfill its democratic
promise.
Clare Hammonds
Brandeis University 
Scott Laderman, Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
Thanatourism - also known as death, dark, or trauma tourism- is a practice that has
gained increasing attention in the last decade and refers to the attraction to places
or events associated with death, disaster, and suffering.1 Scott Laderman attrib-
utes the motivation for this brand of tourism to “martial fascination” (183). To
the burgeoning literature on this topic, Tours of Vietnam adds a critical analysis of
how travel guides, such as the Lonely Planet series, construct an ideologically
skewed history of Vietnam in the minds of Western tourists and both rationalize
and naturalize US intervention in Vietnam. In addition, as a cross-disciplinary
study, it contributes to the field of memory studies, arguing that tourist literature
shapes American national memory, reinforcing images of heroism as depicted in
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Robert R. Korstad and James L. Leloudis, To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in the 1960s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)

McKay, Ian

Liberating Theology: Salem Bland and the Emergence of a Radical Christianity

Cardon, Nathan C.A.

ry, and fills a sizeable gap in the literature. Little work on Great War COs has
been done in comparison with Second World War objectors, while works on
reactions from labour groups or religious orders only mentions objectors in
passing. In addition, these works do not attempt to view the objector’s own
views comparatively or draw wider observations of the issue. Though important
works on Canadian pacifism such as Thomas Socknat’s Witness Against War:
Pacifism in Canada, 1900-1945 (1987) provide a useful overview there is much
ground left to cover. Additionally, while many theoretical or sociological works
on pacifism shed light on the issue, they lack a historical view to “place their
objection in its appropriate context” as “it is important to examine what ele-
ments ion Canadian society affected the decision to object, the experience of
objection and how mainstream society viewed the COs.” (6)  
While the lack of a thorough use of documentary sources is often crip-
pling to a work, Shaw points out that the majority of the COs records were
destroyed by Chief Justice Lyman P. Duff shortly after the war. This forced the
author to rely on newspaper accounts which were often sensationalistic or pro-
vided only rudimentary information. These setbacks notwithstanding, Shaw has
painstakingly attempted to reconstruct as complete a list as possible based on
sources ranging from newspapers accounts to military attestation papers and
leaves the reader with a sound analysis.
Shaw’s Crisis of Confidence in an interesting and valuable first look at a
hitherto neglected component of the Canadian Great War experience and will
prove useful to both general readers and specialists seeking new examinations
and approaches for many issues pertaining to the first two decades of the twenti-
eth century.
Tavis Harris
Wilfred Laurier University
Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris, eds. Racially Writing the Republic:
Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2009).
This fine collection of essays seeks to write race back into our historical and
political narratives of the United States. By collecting a variety of essays from
multiple disciplines, the editors revisit the role of race and racism in the develop-
ment of American political thought and national identity. Essays on canonical
American thinkers and political actors such as Thomas Jefferson, George
Washington, and Abraham Lincoln make clear the ways in which America’s
founding ideals of liberty and democracy were informed by a racially defined
vision. The book, therefore, commits itself to “exposing the false neutrality of a
racially white America that their [the canonical thinkers’] theories presume and to
Book Reviews122
Left History 14_2 ready to go to printer  8/6/10  12:57 PM  Page 122
making visible the various ways in which exclusionary racialized power has been
deployed in the construction of American identity, freedom, and citizenship” (5).
Not content to simply write race back into America political thought,
the editors have also collected essays on a number of “race rebels” whose writ-
ings and actions challenged the racial status quo. These race rebels range from
the well-known – W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and James Baldwin – to
the lesser known – Mexican Texan rebel Juan Nepomuceno Cortina; memoirist
and daughter of Chief Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes, Sarah
Winnemucca; Filipino American poet and migrant worker, Carlos Bulosan; and
playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Each of these race rebels strove for a social jus-
tice informed by their own racialized identity, while maintaining a belief in the
American ideals characterized by the canonical writers and thinkers. Ultimately,
the editors view the book as part of a larger political project that intends to
make clear the current racial challenges faced by Americans and give hope to
those who continue to strive for an antiracist American republic.
Like all collections of essays some of the material in Racially Writing the
Republic does not meet the editors’ intended goals. Unfortunately, this occurs
most often with essays that seek to break free from the black/white paradigm
that has – for good reason – so often dominated writing on race in America.
One example is Jerry Thompson’s “‘The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation’: Juan
Nepomuceno Cortina and the Struggle for Justice in Texas.” Thompson’s essay
does an excellent job of communicating the reasons for and the events sur-
rounding Cortina’s rebellion against Anglo Americans in Texas, but leaves the
reader unsure of the role race played in Cortina’s War. Was Cortina’s motivation
for violent guerrilla warfare based on establishing “racial equality in Texas” or
was his motivation stemming from his class and nationalist interests as a
“Mexican Texan” or “Tejano” (81)?  Perhaps the reason why some of the mate-
rial does not quite succeed is that it is making up for lost ground. Scholarship
seeking to break free from the black/white paradigm must first bear witness to
the existence of alternative race relations and identities that have long been hid-
den or wilfully neglected before delving deeper into how they have contributed
to such broad categories as American political thought and identity.
Nevertheless, Racially Writing the Republic opens doors to explore race in the
United States outside of the black/white binary and indicates the ways in which
power in America is intertwined in a complex matrix of racial, gender, class,
national, and sexual identities.
The majority of essays, however, do succeed in writing race back into
American political thought. Notable highlights include Catherine A. Holland’s
“Shoot Mr. Lincoln”, which suggests that Lincoln was not torn between idealist
and racist selves but was the embodiment of the American liberal tradition.
Holland also asks us to perform a provocative thought-experiment and ask what
if Lincoln was black? Joel Olson presents a nuanced reading of the transforma-
Left History 14.2 123
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tion of race in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, moving from a biological essential-
ism to cultural and geographical environmentalism to social construction. Lastly,
Dorothy Roberts’ essay on Margaret Sanger and the role racism and eugenics
played in propelling forward the birth control movement gives one pause to the
pervasive role race has played in everyday American life.
In many ways this collection of essays crosses familiar ground, histori-
ans of American political thought have long connected racial and gender exclu-
sion to the nation’s ideals of liberty and democracy. Moreover, two essays –
Gwendolyn Mink’s and Gary Gerstle’s – date from 1986 and 1999 and one won-
ders if the editors could have drawn from more recent scholarship. What Racially
Writing the Republic does add to our understanding of the American political lega-
cy is the way in which multiple identities outside of the white/black paradigm
have had a lasting effect on the nation. By “re-writing” race into the United
States’ historical and political narratives, Baum and Harris have given us the tools
to examine the ways in which race and racism continue to define the core beliefs
of American identity and society. As George Lipsitz’s excellent afterword on the
troubling legacy of school segregation makes clear, racism continues to dog
everyday life for all Americans. In the end, Baum and Harris’ collection of
essays makes us wonder who are the race rebels of today and why are there not
more of them?
Nathan C.A. Cardon
University of Toronto
Brian McGinty, John Brown’s Trial (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2009).
It may be typical to laud a praiseworthy biography as “the standard for judging
the literature,” but in the estimation of this biographer there is little exaggeration
in saying that John Brown’s Trial by Brian McGinty is a singular and unparalleled
standard for the study of the most important chapter in the life of the abolition-
ist. McGinty, an attorney and a seasoned historian, has provided the first fully
developed study of the trial of Brown in Jefferson County, Virginia. Brown has
been widely misrepresented and frequently misunderstood by historians, but he
is popularly remembered for his failed effort to initiate a slave liberation move-
ment by seizing a federal armoury in the town of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on
October 16, 1859. Brown scholars have usually sampled aspects of his trial, but
no writer has provided a full examination of the legal character of the story. Yet
McGinty does so in a manner readable and at times quite enthralling. The reader
may sense some admiration for Brown too, but the author holds both him and
his Virginia prosecutors up to the light of a cool, balanced, and reasoned analy-
sis.
Book Reviews124
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Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris, eds. Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

Rowley, Alison

their living quarters and other party privileges. His private papers demonstrate
his desire for Soviet Russia’s industrial competitiveness in a world economy and
administrative efficiency. Like Stalin, Trotsky supported state economic plan-
ning, but through the use of less violent and more democratic methods.
Plagued by periodic bouts of illness, Trotsky remained a revolutionary writer
rather than a politician.
He was expelled from the USSR and sent to Turkey in 1929 for form-
ing an anti-Soviet party and inciting counter-revolution. There he observed dra-
matic transformations in the Russian and international economies. The USSR
had doubled its industrial output by 1932 and the stock market crash heightened
his hopes for a socialist order. Stalin viewed Trotsky’s political aim to restore
Leninism as a conspiracy and wanted him dead. He and his family lived as run-
aways abroad and eventually settled in Mexico, ensconced in a villa that acted as
a fortress. There his devotion to his wife Natalya survived an extra-marital liai-
son with Frida Kahlo, which caused considerable tensions between him and
Diego Rivera. Alarms and Mexican police protection did not deter Roman
Mercador from infiltrating Avenida Vienna and assassinating him in 1940.
Service has written a factual biography, but his goal for a dispassionate
analysis mitigates his incisive political and personal interpretation. His conclud-
ing statements argue that Trotsky’s contradictory ideas endured and that he was a
complex human being. Surely such a complicated figure merits more profound
observations.
Kathleen Lord
Mount Allison University
Sharon A. Kowalsky, Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in
Revolutionary Russia, 1880-1920 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2009).
Deviant Women is one of a growing number of studies to situate intellectual and
cultural developments in Russia within a larger European context. Kowalsky’s
discussion of the impact of Cesare Lombroso’s theories of criminal types,
among other things, demonstrates how Russian criminology was in direct dia-
logue with the rest of the field in Europe. She also charts the rise of other
schools of thought less interested in identifying inborn criminal traits than in
emphasizing the role of socioeconomic conditions in causing crime. With the
establishment of the Soviet state, criminology became a state-supported scientif-
ic discipline, although one that never became dominated by a single approach.
The 1920s saw increasing state concern over crime rates, driven by the assump-
tion that crime was supposed to disappear the closer the country came to achiev-
ing socialism. Hence, crime statistics were used to chart the country’s progress
Book Reviews138
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towards that goal as well as the supposed level of consciousness of the popula-
tion. The same statistics demonstrate what criminologists thought should be
tracked and labelled as a crime. While most criminologists were, to use
Bolshevik terminology, “bourgeois specialists,” they were still driven by a desire
to radically change society. So they chose to work with the new regime.
Kowalsky’s discussion of their activities sheds light on how people negotiated
what it meant to be Soviet in this era when identities and social categories were
so in flux. In her words,
The course criminology took highlights the temporary compatibility of
the Russian intellectual ethos with early Soviet interests, the willingness 
of professionals to work within the limits set by the Soviet state, the 
arenas of independence professionals found for themselves and their 
research within this framework, and the constraints the state placed on 
public, autonomous activity. (54) 
When it comes specifically to the question of female crime, Kowalsky demon-
strates that Lombroso’s 1893 work The Female Offender (co-written with
Guglielmo Ferraro) was seminal. The work established certain notions that
wound up influencing all schools of criminology in Russia until the end of the
1920s. Lombroso and Ferraro stressed the “primitiveness” of women; argued
that female criminals were driven by deviant sexuality; and suggested that women
could more easily be influenced to commit crimes by others than men. At the
basis of their analysis was a deterministic assumption about the role of female
reproductive physiology in criminality.
The persistence of these ideas is the main focus of the book. Kowalsky devotes
entire chapters to attitudes towards sexuality and female deviance; the connec-
tion of female crime with the perceived “backwardness” of the countryside; and
the problem of infanticide. On the basis of pre-revolutionary studies, criminol-
ogists assumed that women’s reproductive systems made them more susceptible
to certain types of crime (abortion, spouse murder, and infanticide). Yet, they
also believed that female crime rates would go up as more women left the
domestic sphere since their isolation there was to blame for their relative “back-
wardness.” Hence, early Soviet investigators searched for evidence that women
were committing a broader array of crimes in an effort to prove that women
were now more equal in society and the country was on track towards socialism.
Instead, they found that women were still committing “female” crimes, just in
greater numbers. This pattern led to disturbing conclusions: was the revolution
somehow incomplete or were women merely unwilling to embrace the new
social order?  
Some of the same questions were raised when criminologists consid-
ered the geography of crime. Relying on Bolshevik notions that assumed urban
life to be more modern than, and culturally superior, to its rural counterpart,
criminologists posited that urban crimes were more professional and less violent
Left History 14.2 139
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than rural crimes. However, they connected female crime with peasant crime.
In this way, according to Kowalsky, “social class and gender became markers of
urban and rural, and thus of progress and backwardness.” (118)  Her case study
of infanticide underscores this point. Soviet criminologists tended to accept pre-
revolutionary views about infanticide, believing it to be a sign of cultural back-
wardness. It was thought the crime was committed by single women out of
shame or fear. Bolshevik social and legal policies that allowed abortions and
provide financial support for single mothers were supposed to eliminate the rea-
sons behind infanticide. So when infanticide rates continued to rise in the 1920s,
criminologists scrambled to explain the situation. For instance, a sudden
upsurge in the number of urban infanticide cases was linked to the migration of
peasant women to the cities, because it was assumed they brought their “back-
wardness” with them. “By incorporating physiological factors into their explana-
tions of infanticide,” Kowalsky writes, “criminologists highlighted both the ‘nat-
uralness’ of the crime and the fundamental ‘primitiveness’ of women.” She goes
on to argue that, “In so doing, they unconsciously cast doubt on the ability of
the socialist project to eliminate conditions that contributed to criminal activity,
implying that women’s crime was natural, rooted in biology, and thus
immutable.” (165-66)
In sum, this well-written and convincingly argued book will appeal to a
number of audiences. By stressing Russia’s connection to intellectual trends in
Europe, Deviant Women, offers new insights to any Europeanist interested in
criminology as well as intellectual and cultural history more generally. For
Russian specialists, the book provides further evidence of the deep continuities
that existed between the late imperial and early Soviet eras. It also raises disturb-
ing questions about Soviet policies vis-à-vis women and sheds new light on
Bolshevik efforts to transform society in the 1920s.
Alison Rowley
Concordia University
Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis,
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Since Martin Jay, Rolf Wiggershaus, and Douglas Kellner’s classic accounts, there
have been few full-length historical accounts of the famed German-Jewish émi-
grés known collectively as the Frankfurt School. Given such a strong pedigree,
the first thing that comes to mind as one sets out to read Thomas Wheatland’s
new book The Frankfurt School in Exile is what is left to say? Wheatland quickly
takes up this concern in his introduction where he makes the claim that many of
the traditional accounts of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social
Research) and their period of exile in the United States fail to adequately explore
Book Reviews140
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Sharon A. Kowalsky, Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880-1920 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009).

-, -

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Laura Barraclough is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Kalamazoo
College and the author of Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscapes, Urban
Development, and White Privilege (University of Georgia Press, 2011).
Wendy Cheng is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific American studies and
Justice & Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State
University. She is currently working on a book manuscript regarding regional
processes of racial formation in majority-Asian American and Latina/o suburbs
in Los Angeles.
Jim Clifford completed his PhD in the history department at York University in
January 2011. He is interested in the social and environmental consequences of
rapid urbanization in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain. His dissertation is
entitled “A Wetland Suburb on the Edge of London: a Social and Environmental
History of West Ham and the River Lea, 1855-1914.”
Karen Dearlove completed a PhD in history from McMaster University in
2009. While a graduate student Karen became involved in local and public histo-
ry in her hometown of Cambridge, Ontario. She is the chair of the City of
Cambridge Archives Advisory Board and has organized two History on the
Grand local history symposiums. Karen is currently the Executive Director of
the Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre in Brantford, as well as the Living
History Multimedia Association.
Victoria Freeman was one of the co-organizers of the Active History:
History for the Future conference in 2008 at Glendon College. She has
recently defended her doctoral dissertation at the University of
Toronto.
Michelle A. Hamilton is Assistant Professor and Director of Public History at
The University of Western Ontario.
Joel Helfrich teaches history at Monroe Community College and Rochester
Institute of Technology. He holds the conviction that a myopic focus defeats the
most important work any historian does—being an active, informed, and
informative member of society. He sees the environment as a site where much
of his historical training can be brought to bear, so he continues to pursue those
interests as well as others.
Stuart Henderson is an historian and cultural critic. His book “Making the
Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s” will be released in 2011 by the
University of Toronto Press.
Craig Heron teaches History and Labour Studies at York University, where he is
a professor in the Department of History. His publications include On the Job,
Working in Steel, The Canadian Labour Movement, The Workers’ Revolt, Booze: A
Distilled History, and The Workers’ Festival. He was president of the Canadian
Historical Association from 2007 to 2009, and serves on the programming com-
mittee of the Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre.
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Ian Hesketh is a research associate in the Department of History at Queen’s
University, Kingston, Ontario. A former co-editor of Left History, he is currently
the assistant editor of The Oxford History of Historical Writing to be published in
five volumes in 2011–12 (Oxford University Press). His publications include Of
Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (University of
Toronto Press, 2009) and The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past
Speak (Pickering & Chatto, 2011).
Bryan D. Palmer is the Canada Research Chair, Trent University, Peterborough,
Canada, and the author of James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American
Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (2007) and Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of
Identity in a Rebellious Era (2009).
Joy Parr is a member of the Geography Department at the University of
Western Ontario. In 2010 she published Sensing Changes, a study of six Canadian
sites where Megaprojects disrupted dwelling, work and the embodied adaptions
of residents to task and landscapes. Her current work in Health Geography con-
cerns the Detroit River International Crossing and environmental/technological
change on the Lake Huron Shore of south-western Ontario.
Thomas Peace is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at York
University. His research focuses on the impact of the eighteenth century fall of
Acadia and Canada on local Aboriginal communities. He is a member of the
editorial collective for ActiveHistory.ca and in Toronto jointly coordinates the
quarterly teaching history workshop Approaching the Past.
Nick Witham is a PhD candidate in the School of American and Canadian
Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK.
Laura Pulido is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of
Southern California where she studies race, political activism, and Los Angeles.
She is the author of Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles
(University of California 2006).
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About the Contributors

Rosales, Oliver A.

Left History 15.1202
onized nation of the Philippines (84). The racial classifications of the white oli-
garchy impacted how workers saw each other and themselves, influencing the
kinds of struggles they waged (i.e., ethnic-specific labour associations) and their
strategic thinking about how to unite against a common enemy. Thus, from the
mid-1800s to the early 1940s, workers struggled among themselves over racial clas-
sifications like coolie, cheap labor, citizen, haole, and American, “defining what
these categories meant and who belonged to them” (188). To unite together,
workers of different ethnic groups needed to confront and overcome qualitative-
ly different racial inequalities.
According to Jung, during World War II and the immediate years preced-
ing it, new “mobilizing structures” and “political opportunities” enabled workers
to transform their thinking about race and class (107). In this period, workers took
advantage of New Deal legislation and the coming of the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB) to Hawaii. Longshoremen in the islands gained
resources and new approaches to organizing from their contact with West Coast
counterparts. Japanese Americans fought valiantly in World War II, shifting per-
ception in the islands of their loyalty.
The impact of these developments culminated in the 1946 strike. For
Jung, the strike represented for workers a new understanding of racial justice as
encompassing united worker power. In other words, workers defined the strike as
not simply an economic struggle – i.e., a campaign for better wages and working
conditions and union power – but as part of the historical struggle of workers in
the islands against racial discrimination and for the rights of immigrants against a
common oppressor.
Can Jung’s insights about the relationship of race and class be applied to
other multiracial settings, beyond colonial Hawaii?  Most definitely. However, the
crucial starting point is for labour historians and social scientists – as well as labour
and community organizers – to discard the predominant framework of “deracial-
ization” and to understand that the making of a working class integrally involves
racial justice.
Glenn Omatsu
California State University, Northridge
Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown
Sol idar i t y (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Race relations between African Americans and Mexican Americans are command-
ing greater attention from scholars. Both racial groups have comprised key con-
stituencies of the American left during the twentieth century. A contributor to the
Du Bois Institute of African and African American Research Nathan Huggins’
Lecture Series, Neil Foley’s Quest for Equality explains the historical failure of Black-
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Book Reviews 203
Brown racial solidarity in the post-World War II civil rights era. Foley argues that
Mexican Americans’ embrace of whiteness blocked any meaningful political soli-
darity between these racial groups, despite experiencing an often-convergent his-
tory of racial discrimination. Mexican American civil rights leaders strategically
avoided civil rights alliances with African Americans on issues pertinent to racial
identity. Foley’s previous scholarship has been critical in integrating whiteness
studies in the field of Chicana/o history, specifically his suggestion that Hispanics’
Faustian pact with whiteness “reinforced the color line rather than crossed or sub-
verted it.” (14)  
Arranged in three chapters including a lengthy introduction and epilogue,
Foley’s core empirical research focuses mostly on the years during and immediate-
ly following World War II. He begins by assessing the impact of the Good
Neigplehbor Policy upon Mexican American and African American civil rights
strategies in the 1940s. An outgrowth of the United States’ fight against fascism,
the Good Neighbor Policy sought strategic hemispheric alliances with Latin
American nations. Mexican American civil rights leaders affixed this policy to their
civil rights strategy, arguing that domestic treatment of Mexican Americans had
significant foreign policy repercussions. In Texas, Mexican American civil rights
leaders pushed legislation such as the Caucasian Race Resolution. In the effort to
g u a rantee Mexican Americans fair tre atment based on wh i t e n e s s, M ex i c a n
American civil rights leaders alienated African Americans. Foley contextualizes the
Mexican impulse toward whiteness by reviewing the long tradition in Mexico and
other Latin American nations of fetishizing white skin, embodied mostly in
Mexico’s post-1810 Revolutionary idea of mestizaje and the Mexican philosopher
José Vasconcellos’ notion of la raza cósmica. Accounting for what Foley calls
Mexico’s “racial amnesia,” Mexico’s racial thinking excluded African and Asian ori-
gin citizens from Mexican racial and national identity (11).
Racial solidarity also failed to emerge in America’s wartime industries
despite the reality that both racial groups faced similar forms of employment dis-
crimination. Mexican Americans chose not to place themselves on the wrong side
of the color line with African Americans in charting a civil rights course. Foley
highlights one poignant example to support his thesis, when Fair Employment
Practices Commission (FEPC) regional director Carlos Castañeda pressed the Oil
Workers International Union (OWIU) to abandon race-based job classifications, as
well as the practice of requiring Mexican workers to share work accommodations
with African Americans. According to Castañeda, the OWIU violated Mexican
labourers’ civil rights and Texas state law by denying them equal rights guaranteed
by a white racial identity, whether they were citizens or contract workers. Such
strategic decision-making, even within a civil rights body such as the FEPC, tem-
pered racial alliances during the formative years of civil rights struggles in the
United States.
Nowhere more obvious was a failure of Black-Brown racial solidarity
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Left History 15.1204
than in the effort to end school segregation. Foley’s third chapter chronicles rela-
tions, or lack thereof, between Mexican American and African American attorneys
and civil rights advocates between the landmark legal cases of Mendez v. Westminster
(1947) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In the Mendez case, Mexican
American civil rights leaders fought for equal rights afforded by white racial status,
s p e c i f i c a l ly the right not to be segregated in so-called Mexican sch o o l s.
Correspondence between Mexican American civil rights leadership and African
American attorneys, including later US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall,
indicates that Mexican Americans narrowly cleaved to a legal challenge to segrega-
tion that endorsed the separate but equal doctrine for Black Americans, but not
Mexican Americans. Middle-class Mexican American leadership according to
Foley lacked the race consciousness to join African Americans in a full-frontal
assault on the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate but equal. Mexican Americans
felt superior toward both recent Mexican immigrants and African Americans.
Association with either group risked a loss of personal, economic and social sta-
tus gained by claiming a white racial identity.
This book is timely given the contemporary debate on illegal Mexican
immigration and its implications on Latinos and African Americans. Racial soli-
darity is critical to challenge the rising tide of racial legislation reinforcing
America’s white racial democracy, so well eluded to in Foley’s book. Future stud-
ies on historical relations between Mexican Americans and African Americans no
doubt will more fully contextualize relations between the two racial groups beyond
the war years. Scholars will grapple though with Foley’s contention that whiteness
has determined the boundaries and permeability of American racial solidarity.
Oliver A. Rosales
University of California, Santa Barbara
Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los
Ange l e s (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).
For contemporary scholars of post World War II United States history, the narra-
tive of struggles for social equality follows a now familiar trajectory. Racially mar-
ginalized groups, galvanized by the economic and social opportunities of the post-
war era, mobilized politically to overtly challenge centuries of American racism;
first, by demanding equal inclusion within the system of liberal democracy; and
later, once frustrated by the deliberately slow pace of change, grew more radical-
ized and pushed for a new politics of self-determination. The liberating promise
of these social movements was cut short in the 1970s for numerous reasons, not
the least of which was the vitriolic backlash against civil rights, the murder of
prominent leaders of color, and the commercial appropriation of the era’s cultur-
al symbols, which turned signs of committed social activism into fashion state-
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Not a member yet

The Call of Passive History

"Workers of the World, Give Me a Call!"

The Democratic Revolutionary: Reviving Lenin

Robert R. Korstad and James L. Leloudis, To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in the 1960s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)

Liberating Theology: Salem Bland and the Emergence of a Radical Christianity

Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris, eds. Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

Sharon A. Kowalsky, Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880-1920 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009).

About the Contributors

Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)

Long Roads to Ludlow

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1,130