This was a small item in Pastrodan's excellent
Religious News Roundup--February 18, 2005 earlier today, but I wanted to give more prominence to what is a sad day for the American historical profession.
Eugene Genovese is probably known to many Kossacks as author of Roll Jordan Roll (1972); it heavily influenced me, and remains one of the finest and most acclaimed studies of antebellum American slavery.
Genovese, alas, has provided a positive blurb for a revised version of Southern Slavery As It Was.
That book, many of you will remember, is the pro-Southern, pro-slavery book co-authored by Douglas Wilson and used in a number of private academies in the South. Wilson says that he is publishing a revised version of his book, under a new title, Black and Tan.
Genovese's blurb is on the flip.
The Reverend Douglas Wilson may not be a professional historian, as his detractors say, but he has a strong grasp of the essentials of the history of slavery and its relation to Christian doctrine. Indeed, sad to say, his grasp is a great deal stronger than that of most professors of American history, whose distortions and trivializations disgrace our college classrooms. And the Reverend Mr. Wilson is a fighter, especially effective in defense of Christianity against those who try to turn Jesus' way of salvation into pseudo-moralistic drivel.
Those who have followed Genovese's career since perhaps 1990 or so will not necessarily be surprised by this turn of events. Although his books helped spark a major re-evaluation of American slavery in the 1960s and 1970s, Genovese has since become alienated from much of the profession, renounced his own Marxist past, and become a historian/practitioner of the "Southern conservative tradition."
What shocks and saddens me about this is that it trades on and cheapens Genovese's academic work on slavery, in a way that much of his more recent political rantings have not.
For more, see http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/10257.html