A Conversation about the Radical History Review: Former and Current Collective Members Reminisce

For our first issue with Duke University Press and to commemorate nearly thirty years of publication of the Radical History Review, the RHR collective decided to host a discussion among several of its members and former members to reminisce about the history of RHR. This discussion was held on May 6, 2000, in Tamiment Library at New York University. Six panelists began the conversation, which then expanded over the next two hours to include several others. All are introduced in the edited account of this conversation below and are listed, with short profiles, at the end.

During our conversation, it quickly became obvious (we knew it already) that the history of the RHR is inextricably connected to the history of the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians' Organization (MARHO) and the Radical Historians' Newsletter. Both are discussed at length below. Moreover, the RHR was a fundamental part of the broader movement for radical history--radical in the sense of uncovering popular experience and agency within the historical process, and radical in the sense of serving the cause of human liberation--that emerged from the New Left. More than anything else, we hope that the conversation below provides insights into radical history in the latter, broader sense.

Thanks to Danny Walkowitz and Dave Kinkela for organizing the conversation, and Karen Sotiropoulus for transcribing it.

Introductions

Andor: Welcome, everybody, to this discussion of radical history and the Radical History Review. To start out, I'd like to ask everyone to introduce themselves.

Robert: Robert Padgug. I was trained as an ancient historian, and I was teaching at Rutgers in the 1970s. I got involved in the RHR in 1973 or 1974 when it first came out as a pamphlet. Graduate students at Rutgers got me involved. I was involved through the late '70s and early '80s, when I changed careers.

Ellen: I'm Ellen Noonan. I got involved in the Radical History Review in the summer of 1996 when I was hired as managing editor. I was managing editor for two years, and then I joined the RHR collective.

Roy: My name is Roy Rosenzweig. I was at the founding MARHO meeting, which I think was in January 1973 at Fordham University. That fall I moved to Boston and worked with Jim O'Brien and the Radical Historians' Newsletter. Then in the fall of '75, Molly Nolan, sitting to my left, moved to Boston and brought MARHO to town. I became more directly involved with MARHO starting in 1975.

Molly: I'm Molly Nolan. I'm one of the people who helped organize that first founding MARHO meeting. I was part of the group that then decided to publish a newsletter and run forums, and then to transform the newsletter into the journal that became the RHR. I worked with the New York group until 1975, as Roy said, then I spent five years in Boston working with and helping to set up MARHO there. Then in 1980, I came back to the city and for a few years ran the forums that used to be an integral part of what MARHO did.

Danny: I'm Danny Walkowitz. I self-identified as a member of MARHO--as a number of people who were young historians in the 1970s did--and attended the forums that people like Molly and others ran at John Jay College through most of the '70s. I moved to New York in 1978, and I think it was around 1980 that I actually joined the collective. I have been involved with it ever since.

Andor: I'm Andor Skotnes, and I joined in the early 1990s. I'm going to moderate this discussion.

The Beginnings of MARHO and RHR as Counterinstitutions...