Volume 14, Number 4 · February 26, 1970
Plantation Power
By J.H. Plumb
The World the Slaveholders Made
by Eugene D. Genovese
Pantheon, 274 pp., $5.45
Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History
edited by Laura Foner, edited by Eugene D. Genovese
Prentice Hall, 284 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Now that the Sixties have closed, it is fitting to salute Eugene Genovese and the salutary, disturbing, critical effect that he must have on the writing of American history—performing, indeed, for his own country the service which Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm did for Britain in the Fifties. The rise of very sophisticated, scholarly, and sensitive Marxist history has been a feature of the cultural life of both countries, making the historians of an older generation look curiously dusty and old-fashioned and bringing the English-speaking historians much closer to those of France and Italy. Not that I can accept in totality the analysis of Genovese any more than I can that of Hill and Hobsbawm: often there is a twist and slither in their arguments in order to achieve the hoped-for consistency with doctrine. But of that, later. Let us stress their virtues.
Review, 2694 words
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