European Studies

EUROPEAN STUDIES. In the past fifty years or so, there have been a few dozen American left-wing historians of European history, as well as a number of scholars, not necessarily left-wing, who studied the European Left. Some of this scholarship stems from the Popular Front period of the 1930s, from pioneers who found a forum in Science and Society and later suffered severely during the McCarthyite purges of the early Cold War. Most of the leftist scholars have been academics; a few have been journalists, notably those associated with Monthly Review. This scholarship burgeoned on American campuses during the 1960s and 1970s, paralleling the rise of the New Left.

The bulk of this research concerns France, which offers rich revolutionary and left-wing traditions and already well established indigenous left-wing scholarship. American left-wing scholars tended to concentrate on the revolutionary tradition, the working class, and the syndicalist, socialist, and communist movements there. Samuel Bernstein, one of the founding editors of Science and Society, led the way with studies stretching from the Revolution of 1789 to the socialist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. American leftists have written less about the Great Revolution (1789–1799) than have non-leftist American historians, however, probably because French Marxists themselves have so dominated this field. Jeffrey Kaplow, who became a left-wing militant in France, was a notable exception.

The leading American left-wing historian of France was Harvey Goldberg (1922–1987), who wrote a classic biography of Jean Jaurès, the founder of the French Socialist Party. A brilliant and extremely popular lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Goldberg drew several thousand students and other interested people to his courses on French, European, and world social history. Eschewing great theories in favor of meticulous archival research, he also trained, in his atelier de l’histoire sociale, over fifty doctoral students in a variety of topics on French working class and left-wing history. Among his protégés have been Marc Lagana, who, after studying the French colonial lobby, finished Goldberg’s own work on Charles Rappaport, a Russian émigré and early member of the French Communist Party; Joan Wallach Scott, at the Institute for Advanced Studies, who did a first-rate study of French glassmakers before going on to gender studies; Nicolas Papayanis, who published on syndicalism in the World War I period; Darryl Holter, on the coal miners of northern France; Charles “Chips” Sowerwine, on feminism and socialism; Tyler Stovall, on the suburban “Red Belt” around Paris; Dale Tomich, on slavery in the French Caribbean; and Edward Rice-Maximin, on the French Left and colonialism.

French working class and social history also attracted non-Wisconsin scholars, not all of whom were left-wing. Princeton’s Natalie Zemon Davis, whose husband had been imprisoned during the McCarthyite period, wrote on early modern social and cultural French history and produced the celebrated Return of Martin Guerre. Charles and Louise Tilly, at the University of Michigan and later at the New School for Social Research, did sociohistorical studies on the revolutionary tradition and working-class actions in France. Louise Tilly, often in collaboration with Joan Scott, also embraced studies of women, work, and the family, as had Zemon Davis. Meanwhile, William Sewell preferred the French working class of the nineteenth century, as did a number of non-leftist historians. Other Americans, such as Robert Wohl and Irwin Wall, studied the socialist and communist movements, while Herman Lebovics examined questions of cultural identity and social conservatism.

Germany increasingly attracted the attention of American left-wing scholars who studied mainly the twentieth-century crises in German socialism and communism, National Socialism and the Third Reich, Germans and Jews, women’s history, and East Germany. Jost Hermand, a literary scholar from Wisconsin, founded the New German Critique, an interdisciplinary journal strongly influenced by the Frankfurt School and primarily devoted to mass culture. David Abraham, a graduate of the University of Chicago, shook up the American historical profession with his 1981 study of the connection between big business and Nazism that challenged the conclusions of certain Ivy League historians. Although exonerated of charges of plagiarism, Abraham was driven from the field. But other left-wing historians continued to work the Nazi period, notably Geoff Eley at the University of Michigan and Jane Caplan of Bryn Mawr, who collaborated with the late British Marxist Timothy Mason on studies of Nazism, Fascism, and the working class.

American left-wing interest in Russian and Soviet history goes back to the Popular Front period, particularly to two prolific men, Frederick Schuman of Williams College, a political scientist, and Ernest Simmons of Cornell, a literature specialist, both of whom wanted to promote a more sympathetic understanding of the Soviet Union and its people. Several other contributors to Science and Society followed in their paths. Ronald Suny of the University of Michigan concentrated mostly on regional histories, while Wendy Goldman wrote on Soviet women and families, and Lynne Viola worked on the peasants.

American left-wing scholars have paid much less attention to other parts of Europe. England, in particular, is one of the least-studied areas, except for a recent interest in women’s history, possibly because British Marxists themselves have so thoroughly combed that field. There remain a few outstanding left-wing generalists, most notably Arno Mayer of Princeton, who wrote major studies of the World War I period and the Russian Revolution, including the celebrated Wilson versus Lenin, and postwar counterrevolutionary movements. Gabriel Kolko, primarily an Americanist, wrote on European politics during World War II and the early Cold War, and Immanuel Wallerstein focused on Europe in his studies of world capitalist systems. During the last thirty years, younger US scholars of European history have mostly abandoned the familiar class issues for studies of race, gender, sexuality and related topics, led in some respects by Natalie Zemon Davis’s and Joan Wallach Scott’s continuing work. The widening field of Holocaust Studies, embraced by some leftwing scholars, followed these trends as well, with special concerns for Jewish and Roma populations, leftwing dissidents, gays and lesbians The “Atlanticist” works of Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh among others brought new interest to pirates of European origins, and to the maroon colonies of mixed race rebels in the Caribbean.

Abelove, Henry, et al., eds. Visions of History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.