This research discusses the views of Eugene Genovese, American historian, on the causes of the American Civil War. Included in this research also is information concerning Genovese and his methodological approach to the interpretation of history.
Eugene Genovese was born in Brooklyn in 1930. Genovese earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooklyn College in 1953, and his doctorate at Columbia University in 1959. Genovese makes his permanent home in Atlanta in the heart of the American South that is the focus of his writing.
Eugene Genovese is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rochester. Genovese is a former president of the Organization of American Historians. Roll, Jordan, Roll won the Bancroft Prize for Genovese in 1974. Genovese is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Center of the Behavioral Sciences. Genovese taught at several universities before becoming established at the University of Rochester. He has been visiting professor at many more universities (some of the nation's most renowned institutions of higher education) since assuming his various positions at the University of Rochester.
Genovese contends that one must recognize and study the diversity of the slave community in the pre-Civil War American South in order to understand the relationship between the institution of slavery and the Civil War. Peter Bardaglio contended, however, that Genovese's hypothesis concerning the role of ideology in maintaining the power of the plantation class is limited by an incomplete examination of the beliefs held by non slave-holding whites in the pre-Civil War American South.
Clarence Walker criticized Genovese for his use of the concept of hegemony in the study of pre-Civil War Southern society. Walker contended hegemony is inadequate as a conceptual framework because it obscures more tha...