A History of History From Below: Race, Class, & Gender

“A History of History From Below” examines the relationship between activism and the emergence of history from below in American higher education. During the 1950s and 1960s,

movements for economic, racial, and gender equality challenged academics to reconsider the nature and importance of their work. Sympathetic leftist historians divided into two approaches. Activist-historians asserted that movements from below did not need external guidance. By

contrast, socialist historians believed such movements needed the expert articulation of a political organization to effect revolutionary change. Socialist historians endowed the expert historian with greater value than the lived experience of movement figures while the activist historian believed the opposite. In the pages of leftist journals such as Studies on the Left and Radical America, socialist historians painted activist-historians as presentists incapable of differentiating their political sympathies from their academic responsibilities. At Socialist Scholars Conferences, New University Conferences, and at American Historical Association Meetings conflicts erupted concerning the role of the historian as activist. Mainstream academics and university administrators reluctantly sided with socialist historians because of their respect for the historian as expert. Administrators and trustees attacked politically outspoken activist historians. Considering the development of departments of modern labor, Black, and Women’s

studies respectively at Pennsylvania, San Francisco, and San Diego state schools in the late 1960s, I argue that a similar pattern unfolded: revolutionary threats provided the context in which more moderate reforms could be achieved. While academic studies of history from below became more acceptable, the more radical political arguments of the activist-historians were constrained.