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In January 1980 I was beginning a Fulbright appointment to teach a seminar on southern history to a group of English schoolteachers attending night classes at the Polytechnic of Central London. Just before I left for my overseas ®ight, I had packed a copy of Wayne Flynt’s Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites,1 recently published in the Minorities in Modern America series. And in one of the ¤rst cold, dark days after I arrived, I read it through in one sitting. At less than 200 pages, it was obviously a synthetic work, covering a broad time period and often little more than a gesture toward the complex stories that made up the history of a people who have been defamed, patronized, or simply ignored in regional and national history. But I responded immediately to the underlying voice of the author. There was deep sympathy for the struggles of those men and women he wrote about, but also a tough-minded vision that could only come from someone who had combined ¤rsthand experience with a scholar’s eye. This was not history written through rosecolored glasses. A decade later, Wayne Flynt published Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites,2 and here he more than ful¤lled the promise of Dixie’s Forgotten People. Twice the length of his ¤rst book on the South’s poor whites and with a smaller stage, here he was able to blend his larger story with telling and often heartbreaking details drawn from oral history and folk culture as well as more traditional sources. It was not simply an effort to describe poor whites as a “class” or a “problem,” but rather as a group of people who struggled to make sense out of their economically impoverished lives and to maintain a sense of their dignity in a larger culture that often treated them 11 The Historian as Public Policy Activist Dan T. Carter with contempt or derision. The great passion that drove Wayne Flynt came, in part, from his own identi¤cation with those struggles. It was, he said “the story of my ancestors and those of most white Alabamians now living in the relative af®uence of the last years of the twentieth century.” And it was written with a purpose: “to help us all remember where we came from and the price others paid for our journey” (xii). I responded positively to Poor but Proud because of its contributions to our understanding of a neglected aspect of southern and American history, but I also recognized a point of view that I shared. I am well aware of the dozens of pithy epigrams that relegate the study of history to an act of self-delusion. As the radical historian and disillusioned former communist Joseph Freeman pointed out, “Everyone falsi¤es history even if it is only his own personal history. Sometimes the falsi¤cation is deliberate, sometimes unconscious; but always the past is altered to suit the needs of the present.” Wayne Flynt has made a similar observation, observing that, in his interviews with those who sprang from the poor of Alabama, “I noticed how selective memory is, often editing out the worst episodes and remembering the good times” (xiii). Even historians—particularly those who care passionately about what they write— can seldom maintain a sense of complete objectivity, he noted. Many of my students (and nonstudents for that matter) greet this frank acknowledgment of personal involvement with disillusionment. Few recognize the irony that historians are the last individuals to begin with the oftstated claim of politicians and pundits that “history proves that . . .” because they understand that what we call history is our understanding—our belief—about the past. This does not mean that any scholar should accept the notion that “history” is simply a weapon to be used as a tool in a struggle for ideological dominance. We are professionally obligated to remain committed to the importance of careful historical research and documentation as well as balance and fairness. But it seems to me to be a mark of honesty to acknowledge that what drives most of us who study history is, in Flynt’s words, a passionate belief that the “past is important to the present.” Like Wayne Flynt, I have always rejected the notion that historians should be bloodless chroniclers of the achievements (or follies) of mankind. I believe that the search for moral justice should lie at the heart of our civic culture, that...

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