Clio's Foot Soldiers: Twentieth-Century U.S. Social Movements and Collective Memory by Lara Leigh Kelland (review)

Clio's Foot Soldiers: Twentieth-Century U.S. Social Movements and Collective Memory makes a valuable contribution to the historiography of public history. In the preface of the text, Laura Leigh Kelland describes her frustration with an oft-told "origin tale" that situates the field's roots in the academic job crisis of the 1970s. Kelland advances an "alternative narrative" in Clio's Foot Soldiers and contends that the practice of public history was indelibly shaped by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and activists who sought to create and disseminate usable histories outside of academia (ix). In this rendering, the field's shift toward more inclusive and diverse representations was not simply a byproduct of the rise of social history within the academy but also the result of the demands of grassroots activists who claimed cultural authority over their own narratives in both mainstream museums and archives as well as parallel community-centered institutions. Kelland contends that these grassroots "proto-public historians" (2) shaped the emergent field of public history, refigured prominent institutions, and provoked conservative backlash during the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Clio's Foot Soldiers examines the way various identity-based social movements of the mid-twentieth century collected, archived, interpreted, and distributed public histories that served their contemporary political goals. In separate chapters, she uncovers proto-public historians embedded in the civil rights, Black Power, women's liberation, gay liberation, and Red Power movements. Although Kelland does draw comparisons and make connections between how activists in these diverse movements engaged with the past, she is sensitive to their differences as well. For example, both civil rights advocates and Black Power activists developed movement schools that advanced a deeper and richer understanding of African American history, but the narratives they promoted and deployed differed substantially. Civil rights movement historians sought to situate the black experience at the center of American history with the goal of securing full citizenship for African Americans, while Black Power advocates developed a transnational heritage intended to cultivate a separatist political identity (39). These kinds of insights enrich Kelland's analysis, even as each of the chapters in the body of the text largely stands on its own as an illustration of her broader interpretive argument.

Kelland contends that social justice advocates in the 1960s and 1970s understood that "the histories legitimated by the state and the academy wrote their efforts, their agency, and their impact out of the past." Movement historians worked toward crafting alternative narratives that would empower contemporary activists. The primary purpose of this work was the desire of activists to advance histories that preserved stories of "reform, resistance, presence, and perseverance" and that "couched their contemporary activism in a long legacy of resistance and survival" (7). To recover these stories, movement activists trained themselves to research, collect, and archive materials that had been marginalized in mainstream repositories, even as they worked toward developing innovative strategies for delivering historical content to movement participants.

Kelland notes that movement historians developed a critique of mid-century academic history. However, in the body of the text, this critique remains relatively implicit as Kelland directs our attention to the development of community-centered institutions and the dissemination of alternative narratives in public spaces. In her introduction, Kelland acknowledges that she "only engage[s] scantily with K-12 curriculum, movement publishing, and more traditional written history forms" and maintains that these areas of professional practice "sit outside of the heart of public history" (4–5). However, in the portions of the book where she advances the claim that movement activists and proto-public historians were responding to and challenging academic interpretations of the past, readers who are unfamiliar with the historiographical trends of the period might benefit from additional context.

Kelland maintains that by the end of the 1970s...