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African American History and Radical Historiography African American History and Radical Historiography Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker Edited by Herbert Shapiro MEP Publications Minneapolis MEP Publications University of Minnesota, Physics Building 116 Church Street S.E. Minneapolis, MN 55455-0112 Copyright © 1998 by Marxist Educational Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging In Publication Data African American history and radical historiography : essays in honor of Herbert Aptheker / edited by Herbert Shapiro, 1929 p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) ISBN 0-930656-72-5 1. Afro-Americans Historiography. 2. Marxian historiography– –United States. 3. Afro-Americans Intellectual life. 4. Aptheker, Herbert, 1915 . I. Shapiro, Herbert, 1929 . E184.65.A38 1998 98-26944 973'.0496073'0072 dc21 CIP Vol. 10, Nos. 1 and 2 1997 Special Issue honoring the work of Herbert Aptheker AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND RADICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY Edited by Herbert Shapiro Part I Impact of Aptheker’s Historical Writings Essays by Mark Solomon; Julie Kailin; Sterling Stuckey; Eric Foner, Jesse Lemisch, Manning Marable; Benjamin P. Bowser; and Lloyd L. Brown Part II Aptheker’s Career and Personal Influence Essays by Staughton Lynd, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Catherine Clinton, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Part III History in the Radical Tradition of Herbert Aptheker Gary Y. Okihiro on colonialism and Puerto Rican and Filipino migrant labor Barbara Bush on Anglo-Saxon representation of Afro- Cuban identity, 1850–1950 Otto H. Olsen and Ephraim Schulman on Truman’s path from FDR to Hiroshima Gerald Horne on gangsters and capitalism Herbert Shapiro on “political correctness” EDITOR: Erwin Marquit (physics, Univ. of Minnesota) MANUSCRIPT EDITOR: Leo Auerbach (English education, retired, Jersey City State College) EDITORIAL STAFF: Gerald M. Erickson, April Ane Knutson, Doris Grieser Marquit (BOOK REVIEW EDITOR) ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Herbert Aptheker (history) Jan Carew (African American studies, Lincoln Univ.) Gerald M. Erickson (classics, Univ. of Minnesota) Morton H. Frank (physiology) Viktoria Hertling (German exile & Holocaust literature, Univ. of Nevada, Reno) Gerald Horne (African American studies, Univ. of North Carolina) Leola A. Johnson (American studies, Univ. of Minnesota) April Ane Knutson (French literature, Univ. of Minnesota) Jack Kurzweil (electrical engineering, San Jose State Univ.) James Lawler (philosophy, State Univ. of New York, Buffalo) Sara Fletcher Luther (political sociology) Doris Grieser Marquit (women’s studies, Univ. of Minnesota) Philip Moran (philosophy, Triton College) Michael Parenti (political science) Howard L. Parsons (philosophy, Univ. of Bridgeport) Epifanio San Juan Jr. (comparative American cultures, Washington State University, Pullman) José A. Soler (labor education, Univ. of Massachusetts, Dartmouth) Ethel Tobach (comparative psychology, City Univ. of New York) VOL. 10, NOS. 1 AND 2 (JANUARY/APRIL 1997) Se VOLUME 10, NUMBERS 1 AND 2 JANUARY/APRIL 1997 NST: NATURE, SOCIETY, AND THOUGHT (ISSN 0890-6130). Published quarterly in January, April, July, and October by MEP Publications, Uni- versity of Minnesota, Physics Building, 116 Church Street S.E., Minneapo- lis, MN 55455-0112. Periodicals postage paid at Minneapolis, Minnesota. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to NST: Nature, Society, and Thought, University of Minnesota, Physics Building, 116 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455-0112. Subscriptions. U.S.A./Great Britain, one year, individuals $15/£12, institutions $28/£20; two years, individuals $28/£22, institutions $56/£39. Other coun- tries, add $4 for postage for each year. Subscription and editorial address: NST, University of Minnesota, Physics Building, 116 Church Street S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455-0112 (tel. 612/922- 7993). Contents are indexed in Sociological Abstracts and Alternative Press Index. Information for Contributors Nature, Society, and Thought welcomes contributions representing the cre- ative application of methods of dialectical and historical materialism to all fields of study. We also welcome contributions not explicitly employing this methodology if the content or subject matter is in an area of special importance to our readers. Submissions will be reviewed in accordance with refereeing pro- cedures established by the Editorial Board. Manuscripts will be acknowledged on receipt, but cannot be returned. Submissions should be made in triplicate, typed, double-spaced, with at least 1-inch margins. Normal length of articles is between 3,000 and 10,000 words, with an abstract of about 100 words. Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the MEP Publications Documentation Style Guide, which appears in NST, vol. 7, no. 1 (1994): 121–23. Citations should follow the author-date system, with limited use of endnotes for discursive matter, as speci- fied in the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition. Unless otherwise arranged, manuscripts should be submitted with the understanding that upon acceptance for publication the authors will submit the manuscript on an IBM- or Macintosh-compatible diskette and transfer the copyright to NST, the authors retaining the right to include the submission in books under their authorship. Diskettes cannot be returned. Consult the NST office about the disk format before sending a diskette. Nature, Society, and Thought Vol. 10, Nos. 1 and 2 (1997) Special Issue African American History and Radical Historiography Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker Edited by Herbert Shapiro Copyright © 1998 by Marxist Educational Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America African American History and Radical Historiography: Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker, edited by Herbert Shapiro, is available in library binding (ISBN 0-930656-72-5) from MEP Publications. CONTENTS Publisher’s Preface vii Editor’s Introduction ix Part I. The Impact of Herbert Aptheker’s Historical Writings Mark Solomon, Herbert Aptheker’s Contributions to African American History 3 Julie Kailin, Toward Nonracist Historiography: The Early Writings of Herbert Aptheker 19 Sterling Stuckey, From the Bottom Up: Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts and A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States 39 Eric Foner, Jesse Lemisch, and Manning Marable, The Historical Scholarship of Herbert Aptheker 69 Benjamin P. Bowser, The Sociology of Herbert Aptheker 83 Lloyd L. Brown, Aptheker and Myrdal’s Dilemma 111 Part II. The Career and Personal Influence of Herbert Aptheker Staughton Lynd, The Bulldog Whitewashed: A Critique of the Investigation of Herbert Aptheker’s Nonappointment at Yale University 119 Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Texts, Contexts, and Subtexts: Herbert Aptheker and the Human Spirit 155 vi Contents ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Catherine Clinton, Remembering Herbert Aptheker 179 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, A Black History Journey: Encountering Aptheker along the Way 189 Part III. History in the Radical Tradition of Herbert Aptheker Gary Y. Okihiro, Colonialism and Migrant Labor: A Comparative Study of Puerto Rico and the Philippines 203 Barbara Bush, Through the Traveler’s Eye: Anglo-Saxon Representation of Afro-Cuban Identity from 1850 to 1950 229 Otto H. Olsen and Ephraim Schulman, Truman’s Cold War: From FDR to Hiroshima 251 Gerald Horne, Rethinking the Lumpen: Gangsters and the Political Economy of Capitalism 285 Herbert Shapiro, “Political Correctness” and the U.S. Historical Profession 309 Bibliography: Works of Herbert Aptheker 341 Contributors 351 Publisher’s Preface African American History and Radical Historiography: Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker is a tribute to the man long regarded by many of us as the dean of U.S. Marxist historians. Herbert Aptheker has been a member of the editorial board of Nature, Society, and Thought (NST) since its inception in 1987 and has been closely associated with the work of the Marxist Educational Press (MEP), which issues the journal. He has been a prominent speaker at several Marxist Scholars Conferences sponsored by MEP. He was the principal lecturer at the MEP Marxist Summer Institute in 1984 and 1985. Two sets of his taped lectures, Lectures on U.S. History and Lectures on Fas- cism, are still available from MEP,, as well as a thirty-five- minute talk on John Brown especially popular with students. A selection of his previously uncollected essays was published by MEP in 1987 under the title Racism, Imperialism, and Peace, edited by Marvin J. Berlowitz and Carol E. Morgan, as volume 21 of the series Studies in Marxism. Because of the appropriately scholarly emphasis in this academic volume, the activist aspect of his life is alluded to only indirectly here. No tribute to Herbert Aptheker should leave the impression, however, that his entire life has been spent in the archives. In his early twenties, for example, he engaged in hazardous educational work in the South, at one point traveling under the pseudonym H. Biel for the Committee to Abolish Peonage. He has always found energy, passion, and courage for popular and polemical speaking and writing, for organizing and agitating in the finest sense of that old and honorable left tradition. The editorial board and staff of Nature, Society, and Thought and the Marxist Educational Press take great pride and personal vii viii Publisher’s Preface ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– satisfaction in publishing this Festschrift in honor of Herbert Aptheker. We have all learned much from our association with him
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