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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
It would be tempting to see the late Alan Dawley as an intellectual product of the 1960s, a decade that has attracted considerable attention among historians and that shaped the political and intellectual preoccupations of a generation. To be sure, Dawley played a part in that era's social-protest movement that shaped his career as a scholar-activist. Katy Weschler Dawley spoke recently of a young man “with a purpose,” who “became committed to achieve goals of justice, civil-rights and antiwar movements.” These were indeed abiding commitments that would have made the separation of activism and scholarship difficult for any historian, and there is no doubt that Dawley was such a writer driven at the outset by political ideals.
1 Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 7, 2008Google Scholar. His activism began as an eighteen-year-old in the midst of the civil rights turmoil of the Deep South. “In the summer of 1962, he helped rebuild a church that had been burned outside Jackson, Miss., and in 1964 he helped African Americans register to vote during the Mississippi Freedom Summer."
2 This commitment continued in his publications as well as in his overt activism. See the contribution to In These Times, reprinted in Alan Dawley, “Paths to Power after the Civil War” in Working for Democracy: American Workers from the Revolution to the Present, ed. Buhle, Paul and Dawley, Alan (Urbana, 1985), 41–51Google Scholar
3 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (1963; New York, 1966), esp. chs. 4–5.Google Scholar
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5 Ibid., 147-48, 227 (quote).
6 Dawley, Alan and Faler, Paul, “Working-Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution: Sources of Loyalism and Rebellion,” Journal of Social History 9 (Summer 1976): 466–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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8 Ibid., 2–3, 70.
9 Ibid., 238.
10 Ibid., 68, 65 (quote).
11 Ibid., 103.
12 Dawley, Alan, “Preface 2000: Lynn Revisited,” Class and Community: The Industrial Evolution in Lynn, 25th anniv. ed. (Cambridge, MA, 2000), xiv.Google Scholar
13 1929 to 1935, to be precise.
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15 Cammett, John M., Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford, 1967).Google Scholar
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22 Ibid., 369–70.
23 Ibid., 364.
24 See also Dawley, Alan, “Workers, Capital, and the State in the Twentieth Century” in Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problem of Synthesis, ed. Moody, J. Carroll and Kessler-Harris, Alice (DeKalb, IL, 1989), 152.Google Scholar
25 , Dawley, “Preface to Synthesis,” 371.Google Scholar
26 Hobsbawm, E. J., “From Social History to the History of Society,” Daedalus 100 (Winter 1971): 20–45.Google Scholar
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28 Ibid., 375 (1st quote), 374 (2nd quote).
29 Morgan, Edmund S., American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975)Google Scholar;Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.
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31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 376.
33 Anderson, Perry, “Origins of the Present Crisis” (1964) in English Questions (London, 1992), 17–47Google Scholar, for the former;, Thompson, Making of the English Working ClassGoogle Scholar, for the latter. See also Thompson, E. P., “The Peculiarities of the English” (1965) in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978)Google Scholar.
34 Wilentz, Sean, “Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790-1920,” International Labor and Working Class History 26 (Fall 1984): 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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36 Ibid., 312.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Dawley, Alan, Struggles for justice, 134.Google Scholar
40 Ibid., 132. These terms came from Heidenheimer, Arnold J. in The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America, ed. Flora, Peter and Heidenheimer, Arnold J. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1981), 275Google Scholar.
41 Rauchway, Eric, Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America (New York, 2006).Google Scholar
42 , Dawley, “Preface 2000: Lynn Revisited,” xxiv.Google Scholar
43 Tyrrell, Ian, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke, UK, 2007), ch. 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
44 See also , Dawley, “Workers, Capital, and the State in the Twentieth Century,” 175–78Google Scholar, where imperialism is seen as an outward thrust and as a product of post-1945 America.
45 , Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 134.Google Scholar
46 Ibid., viii.
47 Ibid., 138.
48 Ibid., 136 (1st quote), 139 (2nd quote).
49 Ibid., 139.
50 Ibid., 138;, Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 12Google Scholar.
51 , Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 213.Google Scholar
52 Dawley does note the role of southern whites favoring prohibition but does not draw the obvious conclusion that the appeal of the dry laws crossed class lines in that region., Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 163Google Scholar.
53 Ibid., 479–80n81, completely neglects the most recent historiography on prohibition in favor of the dated and inaccurate works of Richard Hofstadter, Andrew Sinclair, Joseph Gusfield and James Timberlake.
54 , Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 139.Google Scholar
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56 , Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, 2003), 10.Google Scholar
57 Ibid., 2–3.
58 Ibid., 341.
59 , Dawley, “Workers, Capital, and the State in the Twentieth Century,” 175–78.Google Scholar
60 , Dawley, Changing the World, 75–104.Google Scholar
61 Ibid., 27.
62 Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Cambridge, MA, 2007).Google Scholar
63 , Dawley, Changing the World, 134.Google Scholar
64 Ibid., 283.
65 Ibid., 297.
66 Ibid., 298.
67 Ibid., 357–58.
68 Ibid., 276.
69 Ibid., 290.
70 , Dawley, “Preface 2000: Lynn Revisited,” xix.Google Scholar
71 Ibid., xxiii. Here, he is critical of whiteness studies as an aspect of the cultural constructionist view of race.
72 Dawley, Alan and Trotter, Joe William Jr, “Race and Class,” Labor History 35 (Fall 1994): 486–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
73 , Dawley, Changing the World, 231–36.Google Scholar
74 See, for example,Preston, William Jr, Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933 (Cambridge, MA, 1963).Google Scholar
75 Davis, Allen F., American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York, 1973).Google Scholar
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77 Capozzola, Christopher, “Progressives on a Global Stage,” Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Bra 5 (Jan. 2006): 71–74 (quote, 72).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
78 , Tyrrell, Transnational Nation, chs. 9–12.Google Scholar
79 , Dawley, Changing the World, 6.Google Scholar
