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Gerald Horne

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Revision as of 10:36, 10 January 2023 by 155.93.134.201 (talk) (→Career)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) American historian (born 1949)
Gerald Horne
Gerald Horne during a 2020 book talkGerald Horne during a 2020 book talk
Born (1949-01-03) January 3, 1949 (age 75)
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
OccupationProfessor, writer
EducationPrinceton University (B.A.)
Columbia University (Ph.D.)
University of California, Berkeley (J.D.)
SubjectSocial & cultural analysis of race and class; class and race history

Gerald Horne (born January 3, 1949) is an American historian who currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.

Background

Gerald Horne was raised in St. Louis, Missouri. After his undergraduate education at Princeton University, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Career

Horne holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.

He is a frequent contributor to Political Affairs magazine and guest on Radio Sputnik.

Writing

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Horne has published on W. E. B. Du Bois and has written books on neglected episodes of world history. He writes about topics he perceives as misrepresented struggles for justice, in particular communist struggles and struggles against imperialism, colonialism, fascism, racism and white supremacy. A Marxist, individuals whose lives his work has highlighted in their historical contexts have included the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter John Howard Lawson, Ferdinand Smith (a Jamaican-born communist, sailor, labor leader, and co-founder of the National Maritime Union), and Lawrence Dennis, an African American fascist and racist who passed for white.

While many of Horne's books use a celebrated, intriguing or politically engaged individual as a prism to inspect the historical forces of their times, Horne has also produced broad canvas chronicles of infrequently examined periods and aspects of the history of white supremacy and imperialism such as the post-civil war involvement of the US ruling class—newly dispossessed of human chattels—with slavery in Brazil, which was not legally abolished until 1888, or the attempts by Japanese imperialists in the mid-20th century to appear as the leaders of a global war against white supremacy, thus allies and instruments of "liberation" for people of color oppressed by imperialism.

Manning Marable has said: "Gerald Horne is one of the most gifted and insightful historians on racial matters of his generation."

Historiography in and for the radical tradition

At the Black Women and the Radical Tradition conference held at the Brooklyn College Graduate Center for Worker Education, in a session devoted to Shirley Graham Du Bois, he said:

The purpose of my brief remarks this afternoon is to use the life and times of Shirley Graham Du Bois as a vehicle for trying to understand how and why we need to think about revitalizing the radical tradition through the means of revisioning and rewriting our history, our past. I argue in these remarks that like other historians - for Shirley Graham Du Bois was among other things an historian - she tended to stress in her history writing, like most of the writers of her generation, the "Crispus Attucks" aspect of our history, I'm sure you're familiar with Crispus Attucks, he goes down in history as the first person to be slain in the uprising against British rule in then-British North America and a symbol of how black people have shed their blood to help to construct this country. Which of course is true and is accurate. But it only begins to tell part of the story, as I'll try to elaborate on in my remarks. I think today it's particularly important to talk about revitalizing our past so that we can reinvigorate the radical tradition in light of this precipitous downturn that we see in the capitalist economy. Newsweek has been amongst the many journals that have told us "We're All Socialists Now", which some might be surprised to hear. In Latin America, certainly in the most recent election in El Salvador, and in Latin American generally, one can easily espy a shift to the left. The quipsters are suggesting that the recently departed Pres. George W. Bush entered office in 2001 as a social conservative but then after being compelled to nationalize various enterprises he leaves office as a conservative socialist. When you note that in South Africa you have a Communist Party minister sitting in office in Pretoria, and perhaps the same will take place in New Delhi, after the elections that take place in the late spring, it's time to revive that aspect it seems to me reality is shouting at us, time to revitalize that aspect of black history that stresses our ancestors who as early as the 18th century were actually trying to overthrow the government of the United States of America, as opposed to shedding their blood to help to create the government of the United States of America.

In a speech given at an event marking the depositing of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University, Horne remarked at length on the writing of history, its importance, and what he perceives as the grievous proliferation of propagandistic historiography in the US:

Now it is often said that every generation has to rewrite history. For example, at one time there was a prevalent "moonlight and magnolias" version of slavery and Reconstruction that fundamentally portrayed "happy Negroes" during the slave era and portrayed the period following slavery as a dastardly period of Negro misrule and corruption. This began to change in the 1930s with the publication of Du Bois’ magisterial ‘Black Reconstruction’ and changed decisively with the publication of Eric Foner's ‘Reconstruction.’"

One of the reasons why I personally – and I daresay future generations – are so pleased by the depositing of these CPUSA archives is because it is painfully obvious that the history of the Communist movement in this nation is long overdue for a massive rewriting and these archives will prove indispensable in that process.

It is easy to see why future generations will be displeased with much of the present history that has been written to this point about the Communist Party because it has been incredibly biased, one-sided, deeply influenced by the conservative drift of the nation – not unlike pre-Du Bois histories of Reconstruction – and, fundamentally, anticommunist.

From 2013 to date, Horne has discussed his historical, socio-economic and political research findings in a series of conversations with Paul Jay.

Works

  • Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War. SUNY Press (1986)
  • Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946-1956. Farleigh Dickinson University Press (1987)
  • Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party. University of Delaware Press (1994)
  • Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising And The 1960s. Da Capo Press (1997)
  • From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980. University of North Carolina Press (2000)
  • Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950 : Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds and Trade Unionists. University of Texas Press (2001)
  • Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois. NYU Press (2002)
  • Horne, Gerald (2004). Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire. New York University Press. ISBN 9780814736418. JSTOR j.ctt9qg215.
  • Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920. NYU Press (2005)
  • The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten. University of California Press (2006)
  • Cold War in a Hot Zone: The United States Confronts Labor and Independence Struggles in the British West Indies. Temple University Press (2007)
  • The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas After the Civil War. University of Hawaii Press (2007)
  • The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade. NYU Press (2007)
  • Blows Against the Empire: U.S. Imperialism in Crisis. International Publishers (2008)
  • Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica. NYU Press (2009)
  • Mau Mau in Harlem?: The U.S. and the Liberation of Kenya. Palgrave MacMillan (2009)
  • The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States. NYU Press (2009)
  • W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography. Greenwood Press (2009)
  • The End of Empires: African Americans and India. Temple University Press (2009)
  • Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism, and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawaii. University of Hawaii Press. (2011)
  • Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation. NYU Press. (2013)
  • Black Revolutionary: William Patterson & the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle. University of Illinois Press (2013)
  • The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. NYU Press (2014)
  • Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow. Monthly Review Press (2014)
  • Confronting Black Jacobins: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution and the Origins of the Dominican Republic. Monthly Review Press (2015)
  • Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary. Pluto Press (2016)
  • The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Albert Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox. University of Illinois Press (2017)
  • Storming the Heavens: African Americans and the Early Struggle for the Right to Fly. Black Classic Press (2017)
  • Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity. NYU Press (2018)
  • The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy and Capitalism in Seventeenth Century North America and the Caribbean. Monthly Review Press (2018)
  • Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music. Monthly Review Press (2019)
  • White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela. International Publishers (2019)
  • The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. Monthly Review Press (2020)
  • The Bittersweet Science: Racism, Racketeering, and the Political Economy of Boxing. International Publishers (2020)
  • The Counter-Revolution of 1836:  Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism. International Publishers (2022)

Footnotes

  1. "Gerald Horne", Political Affairs.
  2. NYU Press. Archived 2014-03-23 at the Wayback Machine
  3. Video: "The Life & Times of Shirley Graham Dubois".
  4. "Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party", People's World, April 6, 2007.
  5. "Gerald Horne conversations with Paul Jay (2020 to date)". TheAnalysis.News. Retrieved 4 March 2022.
  6. "Gerald Horne conversations with Paul Jay (2013-2019)". TheRealNews.com. Retrieved 3 March 2022.

External links

Recorded speeches and interviews
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