Eugene genovese

Eugene Dominic Genovese (May 19, 1930 – September 26, 2012) was an American historian of the American South and American slavery.
Eugene D. Genovese was an American historian.
Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery.

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Eugene Genovese’s scholarship made an enormous difference despite the challenges that he faced. As a self-proclaimed Marxist, he had to make his way through an unreceptive professional discipline – history – in a country still feeling the effects of McCarthyism, and he took on one of the central areas of historical interpretation, the coming and significance of the Civil War. What got him a hearing and then the notice of distinguished historians like C. Vann Woodward and David Potter was the breadth of his research, the clarity of his arguments, and the respect he paid to intellectual adversaries (sometimes more than they deserved). At a time when most scholars thought the debates over the Civil War had largely been resolved and a “consensus” interpretation reigned supreme, Genovese wrote of a fundamental, and revolutionary, battle between two different and increasingly antagonistic societies: a bourgeois North and a pre-capitalist South. In a series of immensely influential books – especially The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), and The World the Slaveholders Made (1969)

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Eugene Genovese: Truth-Teller

Eugene Dominick Genovese, the eminent historian of slavery and the American South who died last week at his home in Atlanta, was legendary not only for the brilliance of his scholarship but for his intellectual integrity and his utter loathing of hypocrisy and cant.

Although I am not an historian and I never sat in his classroom, I cannot help but think of Gene as an esteemed teacher and of myself as one of his students. Gene and his late wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, an equally distinguished historian and his co-author on many important works, were my dear friends. I learned much from them not only about the historical subjects to which they devoted themselves so fruitfully, but also, and more importantly, about what it means—and what it takes—to be a scholar.

Gene’s place in the pantheon of American historians was fixed by his pathbreaking study of slavery in antebellum America titled Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. While hardly an apologia for slavery—indeed, Gene was still a devout Marxist revolutionary when he wrote the book an

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Eugene D. Genovese (1930–2012)

The death of a favorite teacher in his or her late old age typically evokes strong emotions from former students in their early old age. In this case the emotions are mine and the teacher is Gene Genovese, one of my professors at Rutgers when I was an undergraduate from 1962 to 1966. We remained in contact off-and-on over the decades and I saw him last in Atlanta in July 2010. This piece is not another attempt to offer an instant analysis of the “real” Genovese, an enterprise now well underway in cyberspace. Rather, I want to add something to the story from the perspective of an undergraduate he taught who subsequently entered what Gene called the “history business.”

I first heard about Gene in the fall of 1963, the first semester of my sophomore year, from my friend Ken O’Brien (who also entered the history business). Ken was taking Gene’s course in American Negro history. As a naive eighteen-year-old from a white working class-lower middle class New Jersey family, I was surprised to hear that this subject existed. I soon learned in detail that it