Jackson Lears

Coming of age during the Vietnam War, I cut my cultural teeth on an exalted idea of intellectuals. They were the people who challenged the official pieties, especially the easy equation of power and virtue, the American civil religion that justified imperial misadventure. Sometimes, even at my conservative southern university, they were my professors—especially the historians Paul Gaston and Bill Harbaugh. By exposing the mendacity of American policy, they fostered a critical spirit in their students. By challenging the equation of anticolonial nationalism with Soviet communism and exploring the futility of foreign attempts to crush a popular insurgency, they gave us an alternative way of seeing the U.S. role in the world.