Editor's Introduction

The contents of this issue emphasize the importance of radical history in the crucial tack of revisioning the past. Each piece reexamines particular events and historical processes that have already attained a history, in some cases even a "left" history, and brings a critical perspective that deepens our knowledge of the individual subjects. In addition, these studies require a new set of questions to be raised about the purview of radical history. Beyond the revisionism of traditional historiography that notes the lineage of debates on a topic, these authors challenge what were or have become commonsense interpretations of the subjects under study. Returning to the history of the New Left and of the desegregation struggles in Boston and by exploring the politics of historical memory in depression-era Los Angeles, postunification Germany, and postapartheid South Africa, the authors demonstrate anew that considerations of gender, race, and national identities as well as class are key components of radical history in the twenty-first century.

Amy Kesselman presents a new look at the debate over the failure of the New Left of the 1960s to endure and create a lasting movement. Rejecting as too narrow the view of those who lament the fragmentation of radical activism and blame "identity politics"--the emergence of African American and feminist movements--for its demise, she focuses on the emergence of a feminist consciousness and a subsequent women's liberation organization among young white women in New Haven. These women were members of a well-organized white radical group that challenged the war, racism, and capitalist injustice. Dominated by male leadership, the organization was not receptive when female members began to raise issues of concern to women. In fact, as Kesselman shows, at first many women resisted the call of their sisters in the movement to support inclusion of feminist issues. It is that resistance which Kesselman argues fragmented the movement, not feminism itself. The refusal of a political movement that considered itself progressive (and in many ways it was) to rethink its agenda and include the concerns of those committed to the same goals of social justice shut out those women who had been a crucial part of the movement. In the early 1980s Barbara Taylor, in Eve and the New Jerusalem, described the damage done to Chartism by men's inability to take women's concerns into account. Kesselman's essay suggests the damage that can be done to radical politics, both now and in the future, by versions of history that ignore or misunderstand the tensions raised by gender as well as class.

Phoebe Kropp and Jeanne Theoharis both explore the importance of race in the shaping of history. In particular, Kropp reveals the ways that white Angelenos reinvented the history of a Chicano neighborhood in order to claim that space for themselves and to regulate the behavior and movements of the Mexican communities. The Anglo elite located a romanticized version of a "traditional" Spanish market in a plaza that was a site with social and economic significance for ethnic Mexicans. The white socialite who championed the project concocted costumes deemed "historic," which she required Mexican vendors to wear. The vendors resisted both the costumes and being relegated to temporary market stalls, unlike the permanent shops run by Anglos who did not dress in costume. The Anglo elite thus intended to sanitize the area both materially and politically and to control potential conflicts that arose due to the economic hardships of the depression. Just as intentionally, Mexicans and Mexican Americans asserted the right to define their own identities and worked to reclaim the space that whites threatened to usurp. Olvera Street became a site of contested history, a contest for the right to representation and, for the Mexicans, a struggle for a political voice.

Jeanne Theoharis challenges the studies of the Boston school desegregation debacle that focus on the response of white working-class communities and the reasons for those responses by downplaying or even rejecting racism as the force behind the violent behavior of those communities. Theoharis warns...