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The Scholarly Odyssey of an Activist Historian: Alan Dawley in Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Ian Tyrrell
Ian Tyrrell
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales
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Extract

It would be tempting to see the late Alan Dawley as an intellectual product of the 1960s, a decade that has attracted considerable attention among historians and that shaped the political and intellectual preoccupations of a generation. To be sure, Dawley played a part in that era's social-protest movement that shaped his career as a scholar-activist. Katy Weschler Dawley spoke recently of a young man “with a purpose,” who “became committed to achieve goals of justice, civil-rights and antiwar movements.” These were indeed abiding commitments that would have made the separation of activism and scholarship difficult for any historian, and there is no doubt that Dawley was such a writer driven at the outset by political ideals.

Type
Alan Dawley (1943–2008): Memorial and Assessment
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 29 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2009

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References

1 Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 7, 2008Google Scholar. His activism began as an eighteen-year-old in the midst of the civil rights turmoil of the Deep South. “In the summer of 1962, he helped rebuild a church that had been burned outside Jackson, Miss., and in 1964 he helped African Americans register to vote during the Mississippi Freedom Summer."

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