1. A twitter conversation with @CoreyRobin & @KathaPollitt got me thinking about Eugene Genovese & Betsy Fox-Genovese.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
2. I met Genovese and Fox-Genovese in a seminar setting back in the 1990s. I was of course in awe of them for their major works on slavery
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Replying to @HeerJeet
3. By the 1990s, both Genovese and Fox-Genovese had turned sharply to right politically. I got a glimpse of their politics in seminar
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Replying to @HeerJeet
4. Betsy Fox-Genovese was very hostile to feminism & lamented declining fertility of white Americans.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
5. Eugene Genovese startled me by saying that he thought pro-slavery advocates much more theologically sound than abolitionists
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Replying to @HeerJeet
6. In a sense, Genovese was right: if you accept rigid reading of Bible, slave-owners right. What was surprising was that Genovese did so.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
7. Genovese would elaborate on this point in the last book he and Betsy collaborated on Mind of the Master Class.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
8. MotMC is largely celebration of great learning, erudition, and piety of the slave-owing class, showing their theological fidelity.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
9. In MotMC Genoveses ultimately condemned slave-owners, not on abolitionist grounds, but for failure to live up ideal of Christian mastery
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Replying to @HeerJeet
10. So: what happened to Genovese & Fox-Genovese, whose great work of 1960s-1980s is still central to understanding slavery?
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11. In part, the answer is even in his Marxist days, Genovese had tendency to idealize slave owners out of desire to take them seriously
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Replying to @HeerJeet
12. In trying to take slave-owners seriously as a ruling class, Genovese tended to overstate their shrewdness, paternalism, foresight, etc.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
13. As
@notjessewalker notes, historians sometimes go native, which is partly what happened to Genovese.2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes - Show replies
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