Volume 45, Number 8 · May 14, 1998
Comparatively Speaking
By Leonard Thompson
The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements
by George M. Fredrickson
University of California Press, 241 pp., $27.50
Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa
by George M. Fredrickson
Oxford University Press, 390 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Comrades in Business: Post-Liberation Politics in South Africa
by Heribert Adam, by Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, by Kogila Moodley
Cape Town: Tafelberg, 239 pp.
Unlike musicologists, psychologists, and many other scholars, historians usually concentrate on a specific period and place, and feel that they can never learn enough about them. Those who spend much of their lives comparing the histories of different societies are relatively rare and, of them, George Fredrickson is certainly one of the most distinguished. He tells us that he was attracted to the study of race relations by the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, and to comparative history by Louis Hartz, one of his Harvard professors, who was then writing his study The Founding of New Societies.[1] The Comparative Imagination, a collection of essays on the theory and practice of comparative history, and Black Liberation, a comparison of the ideologies of black opponents of white supremacy in the United States and South Africa, are among the most recent examples of his work and give us a good opportunity for assessing how comparative history can contribute to modern knowledge.
Review, 3981 words
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