Editors' Introduction

This issue of Radical History Review contains contributions that focus on a variety of historical themes, times, places, topics, and approaches. The issue begins with a forum on the work of Eugene Genovese, a historian who has contributed enormously to, but who now vigorously opposes, U.S. radical historiography. The forum, an extension of a panel sponsored by RHR at the 2001 annual meeting of the American Historical Society, attempts to probe the complexity of Genovese's writing and the disparate emotional and intellectual responses we as historians have had to it. The essays by Manisha Sinha, James Livingston, James Oakes, Peter Kolchin, and Diane Sommerville offer a rich variety of insights.

The three featured articles in this issue all deal in their own ways with history, activism, and advocacy. Donald Reid's "Etablissement: Working in the Factory to Make Revolution in France" explores the motivations and experiences of the French radical students and intellectuals of the late 1960s and early 1970s who, in order to transform themselves politically and connect with the working class, took jobs in proletarian workplaces. In an article that may remind some of our readers of their own earlier lives, Reid explores the politics, motivations, and experiences of the établis, and the literature that has more recently grown up around them. Marian Mollin's "The Limits of Egalitarianism: Radical Pacifism, Civil Rights, and the Journey of Reconciliation" also addresses youthful post-World War II activism and advocacy, in this case of a single political action mounted in the United States in 1947 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and its offspring, the Congress of Racial Equality. Mollin's main concerns are the contradictions of the attempt to fuse pacifism with the black freedom struggle in this precursor to the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s, and the gender politics that it demonstrated. Ellen Wiley Todd's "Visual Design and Exhibition Politics in the Smithsonian's Between a Rock and a Hard Place" is about a different kind of activism and advocacy. The article examines an exhibition at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution on the two-centuries-long history and current realities of U.S. garment sweatshops. At least since the Enola Gay exhibit of 1995, it has been clear that historical museums (and especially the Smithsonian!) are terrains of fierce struggle of historical meaning. Todd analyzes how both the curators and the viewers of this exhibit have navigated this particular terrain.

The two reviews in this issue's "(Re)views" section are quite different from each other in subject and purpose, but both raise important questions about how we view our world. Joanna Waley-Cohen's "The New Qing History" references nine books published over the last six years to investigate several key issues of the current, intense historical debate over the character of Manchu rule in China in the centuries before the European intrusions of the mid-nineteenth century. Cautioning us that it can be problematic to "apply to China criteria forged on the basis of European experience," Waley-Cohen nonetheless teases out fascinating insights not only about Qing distinctiveness but also on the contingencies of non-Western modernities, as well as antecedents (such as the functioning of gendered, ethnically nuanced imperialisms) of Western modernity. By contrast, Kitty Krupat's "Writing the 'Labor Question' Back into History" reviews a single book. Nonetheless, Nelson Lichtenstein's State of the Union: A Century of American Labor addresses a topic of "epic" proportions—in Krupat's words, "twentieth-century trade unionism and its relationship to American democracy." Krupat draws on her own long experience in and study of the U.S. labor movement to reflect on the book's main themes.

Finally, this issue's "Teaching Radical History" section contains accounts of two courses: Elizabeth Reis's "Teaching Transgender History, Identity, and Politics" and Raymond B. Craib's "Peasants, Politics, and History: Teaching Agrarian History and Historiography." As "TRH" editor Ian Christopher Fletcher points out in his introduction to this section, while these two essays seem quite dissimilar, both carry on...