Volume 35, Number 8 · May 12, 1988
The Historian as Populist
By Michael Kazin
Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class
by Herbert G. Gutman, edited by Ira Berlin
Pantheon, 452 pp., $29.95
Herbert Gutman, who died in 1985 at the age of fifty-seven, was one of a small group of older American historians who made the experience of workers, women, and racial minorities central to the study of American history. In so doing he became a guiding influence for many of the hundreds of younger scholars of the late 1960s and 1970s who were exploring such subjects as slave religion, immigrant family life, and the ideology of artisans. Gutman's own writings concentrated on the blacks and European immigrants who did most of the labor on plantations and in factory towns and cities during the nineteenth century. Drawing on statistics, stories, poems, and his own provocative interpretations of historical events, he gave a version of slavery and industrialization quite different from the rather grim and dry portraits that are still to be found in textbooks.
Review, 3519 words
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