33 Facts About Eugene Genovese

Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery.

Eugene Genovese was noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South.

Eugene Genovese later abandoned the left and Marxism and embraced traditionalist conservatism.

Eugene Genovese wrote during the Cold War and his political beliefs were viewed by some as highly controversial at the time.

Eugene Genovese's father was an immigrant dockworker and Eugene was raised in a working-class Italian American family.

Eugene Genovese taught at another dozen universities, including Yale, Cambridge and Rutgers.

Eugene Genovese was later discharged from army service for his communist leanings.

Eugene Genovese first taught at Brooklyn's Polytechnic Institute from 1958 to 1963.

From 1986, Eugene Genovese taught part-time at the College of William and Mary, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Georgia, Emory University and Georgia State University.

Eugene Genovese was an editor of Studies on the Left and Marxist Perspectives.

Eugene Genovese was famous for his disputes with colleagues left, right and center.

In 1998, after moving to the political right in his thinking, Eugene Genovese founded The Historical Society, with the goal of bringing together historians united by a traditional methodology.

Eugene Genovese insisted that he did not mean to say that he hoped American servicemen would be killed.

Eugene Genovese moved to Canada and taught at Sir George Williams University in Montreal.

In 1968, Eugene Genovese signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

In 1968, Eugene Genovese wrote a critical historiography of the major studies of slavery in the Americas from a hemispheric perspective.

Eugene Genovese considered the demand by Marxist anthropologist Marvin Harris in The Nature of Cultural Things for a materialist alternative to the idealistic framework of Frank Tannenbaum, Stanley Elkins, Gilberto Freyre, and others.

Eugene Genovese took issue with the attempt to apply a Marxian interpretation to the Southern slave system.

Eugene Genovese viewed the antebellum South as a closed and organically united paternalist society that exploited and attempted to dehumanize the slaves.

Eugene Genovese paid close attention to the role of religion as a form of resistance in the daily life of the slaves, because slaves used it to claim a sense of humanity.

Eugene Genovese redefined resistance to slavery as all efforts by which slaves rejected their status as slaves, including their religion, music, and the culture they built, as well as work slowdowns, periodic disappearances, and escapes and open rebellions.

Eugene Genovese applied Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony to the slave South, as well as to Caribbean case studies.

Eugene Genovese placed paternalism at the center of the master-slave relationship.

Eugene Genovese noted that Evangelicals recognized slavery as the root of Southern ills and sought some reforms, but from the early decades of the nineteenth century, they abandoned arguing for abolition or substantial change of the system.

Eugene Genovese's contention was that after 1830, southern Christianity became part of social control of the slaves.

Eugene Genovese argued that the slaves' religion was not conducive to millenarianism or a revolutionary political tradition.

King argued that Eugene Genovese incorporated the theoretical concepts of certain 20th-century revisionist Marxists, especially the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and his construct of hegemony.

Areas of criticism included Eugene Genovese's placing of the master-slave relationship at the center of his interpretation of the American South, his views on southern white guilt over slavery, his employment of Gramsci's construct of hegemony, and his interpretations of southern white class interests, slave religion, the strength of the slave family, the existence of slave culture, and the theory of the generation of black nationalism in the antebellum years.

Eugene Genovese concluded that by recognizing human sinfulness and limitation, the critics more accurately described human nature than did other thinkers.

Eugene Genovese argued that the Southern Agrarians posed a challenge to modern American conservatives who believe in market capitalism's compatibility with traditional social values and family structures.

Eugene Genovese agreed with the Agrarians in concluding that capitalism destroyed those institutions.

In 1969, Eugene Genovese married Elizabeth Fox, a historian.

Eugene Genovese died in 2012, aged 82, from a "worsening cardiac ailment" in Atlanta, Georgia.