Staughton Lynd: The Battle over Radical History
[Staughton Lynd is an historian and activist. He currently lives in Youngstown, Ohio.]
In a review essay entitled “What Politics Does to History,” July 19, 2010, John Summers states that my work on the American Revolution “helped initiate the long fashion for sneering at dead white men of ideas, and turned history from a means of understanding to a record of heroes and villains.” Mr. Summers also finds in my work a “refusal to acknowledge the many-sidedness of history" that "has been part of [my] method from the beginning.” What he calls “the Lynd-Zinn school of historiography” in his view has “difficulty conceding that mass movements could be anything but democratic and progressive.” Most egregiously, Mr. Summers writes: “Lynd was never a historian who selects significant problems for study, but one who knows most of the answers in advance.”
The reality is that regarding one issue after another, I reached conclusions quite different from my initial presuppositions....
Mr. Summers is wrong when he states that I assume mass movements to be democratic and progressive. In distinction from my beloved comrade, Howard Zinn, I have been concerned not so much with rescuing the voices of the people "below" as with exploring whatever light their views may seem to throw on a variety of problems of interpretation.
I believe that historians should look to one another's scholarly products and evaluate these by conventional academic methods. Calling each other names gets in the way.
Read entire article at The New Republic
In a review essay entitled “What Politics Does to History,” July 19, 2010, John Summers states that my work on the American Revolution “helped initiate the long fashion for sneering at dead white men of ideas, and turned history from a means of understanding to a record of heroes and villains.” Mr. Summers also finds in my work a “refusal to acknowledge the many-sidedness of history" that "has been part of [my] method from the beginning.” What he calls “the Lynd-Zinn school of historiography” in his view has “difficulty conceding that mass movements could be anything but democratic and progressive.” Most egregiously, Mr. Summers writes: “Lynd was never a historian who selects significant problems for study, but one who knows most of the answers in advance.”
The reality is that regarding one issue after another, I reached conclusions quite different from my initial presuppositions....
Mr. Summers is wrong when he states that I assume mass movements to be democratic and progressive. In distinction from my beloved comrade, Howard Zinn, I have been concerned not so much with rescuing the voices of the people "below" as with exploring whatever light their views may seem to throw on a variety of problems of interpretation.
I believe that historians should look to one another's scholarly products and evaluate these by conventional academic methods. Calling each other names gets in the way.