The Origins of the Revolutionary Tradition in America (feat. Gerald Horne)

Emancipations Podcast

We are joined by Dr. Gerald Horne for a discussion on the meaning of the American Revolution and his extensive scholarship on re-assessing 1776 as a "counterrevoluton." At the heart of this discussion is the political and practical question for socialist politics in our time, namely: what is salvageable from 1776, and what is not? How do we read history from a materialist point of view?

Dr. Horne's scholarship traces the social forces that brought about the rebellion of 1776 back farther than most historians of the American Revolution have done, by showing how the international forces went to shape the early settlers in relationship to the threat of slave rebellions and resistance. Horne's work also sheds light on a far more extensive network of resistance and rebellion amongst enslaved Africans that has largely gone ignored by historians and he reveals how central the slavery question was to the wider movements of 1776.

Chapters

• Opening and Intro to Dr. Horne
• Is the American revolution a purely bourgeois revolution?
• Can we salvage the optimism of 1776?
• Is there a revolutionary tradition in America?
• Understanding slave rebellions and resistance pre-1776
• How can history help the "class vs. race" debate that often divides the left?
• How is "counterrevolution" related to Trump? Is Trump Bonapartist or Fascist?
• How can socialists contest the two capitalist parties in America?
• Closing and future of Dr. Horne's scholarship and work

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Dr. Gerald Horne holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies. His research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations and war. He has also written extensively about the film industry. Dr. Horne is the author of more than thirty books and one hundred scholarly articles and reviews. His current research includes two forthcoming books: The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery, Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism and Revolting Capital: Racism and Radicalism in Washington, D.C., 1918-1968. His other projects include a study of U.S. imperialism in Northeast Africa, principally Egypt and Ethiopia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a similar study concerning U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia during the same period. He won the American Book Award for The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century in 2021.