J. LEMISH. IN ACTIVE SERVICE TO WAR AND PEACE. POLITICS, IDEOLOGY, AND PROFESSIONAL AMERICAN HISTORIANS
J. LEMISH. On Active Service in War and Peace. Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession. "New Hogtown Press". Toronto. 1975. IX + 150 p.
The book under review is based on the report of one of the most prominent representatives of the radical trend in American bourgeois historiography, Jesse Lemish, made at the 84th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (AIA) in 1969.1 The work of Lemish, now a lecturer at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which received a very wide response in the press2, was never published in the United States. As the left-wing Canadian historian T. Schofield notes in the preface, Lemish's work was distributed "clandestinely" (p. 2). As a response to the anti-Soviet book "On Active Service to Peace and War" by G. Stimson and M. Bundy published at the height of the Cold War, 3 this speech was directed against the political trend that was dominating in American bourgeois historiography during the Cold War, against those who preach American hegemonism and politics "from a position of strength", turning historiography into an ideological weapon of American expansionism. Lemish's book, Schofield notes, is "an attack on historiography and historians serving the establishment" (p. 11).
Responding to neoliberals who accused historians from the new left of presentism, Lemish emphasizes that this sin is most inherent in historians of apologetic trends, although they sometimes hide their political bias under the guise of objectivity and impartiality. All their behavior is clearly political in nature, as both the 50s and 60s clearly demonstrated.
The author examines in detail the anti-radical political and methodological attitudes of a group of prominent American bourgeois historians, such as I. Unger. Lemish objects to the charge that radical historians sacrifice the interests of science to their political beliefs. In particular, he emphasizes that in the 1940s and 1950s, left - wing historians (among them, he me ...
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