In a review essay entitled “What Politics Does to History,” July 19, 2010, John Summers states that my work on the American Revolution “helped initiate the long fashion for sneering at dead white men of ideas, and turned history from a means of understanding to a record of heroes and villains.” Mr. Summers also finds in my work a “refusal to acknowledge the many-sidedness of history" that "has been part of [my] method from the beginning.” What he calls “the Lynd-Zinn school of historiography” in his view has “difficulty conceding that mass movements could be anything but democratic and progressive.” Most egregiously, Mr. Summers writes: “Lynd was never a historian who selects significant problems for study, but one who knows most of the answers in advance.” Read More

I am the author of the biography, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970, that was nominally reviewed by John H. Summers in “What Politics Does to History” (TNR online July 19, 2010). The essay was couched as a review, but reads instead like a broadside against my subject, with little reference to the specific arguments raised in the biography. Summers accuses Lynd of refusing to “acknowledge the many-sidedness of history” in part because my subject “knows most of the answers in advance.” Summers’s “review” suffers precisely from his conscious distortion of the record to arrive at this own predetermined conclusions. Read More

Staughton Lynd balks before this statement: “Lynd was never a historian who selects significant problems for study, but one who knows most of the answers in advance.” Yet nothing in his letter warrants a claim to the contrary. “The reality is that regarding one issue after another,” he writes, “I reached conclusions quite different from my initial presuppositions.” Which presuppositions he once held, why, how, and when they changed, he does not say. Read More