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“Radical historian” means different things to different people. There is certainly a generational divide in how most of us understand this label and its professional context. I am not of Roy’s generation, so I won’t pretend to understand what it meant to Roy to be a “radical historian” when, as a graduate student, he was among the founders of the MidAtlantic Radical Historians Organization, or MARHO. Intellectually, MARHO “sought to develop a critical history as a means of understanding capitalism as a mode of production and as a complex system of social relations.” Professionally, MARHO sponsored forums, conferences, a newsletter, and the Radical History Review, all designed to help put those politics into action by promoting teaching and public history to non-scholarly audiences at a time when the mainstream of the profession marginalized such activities.
Unlike so many of the enthusiasms of youth, Roy never outgrew being a radical historian. He was at the founding MARHO meeting in 1973, a member of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective until 2000, and an Associate member of the journal until his death in October. He was the “Organizing Secretary” of the early MARHO Associates groups, charged with maintaining contact between far-flung outposts of radical historians and the mother-ship MARHO collectives in Boston, New Haven, and New York. Roy was one of the editors of the influential “public history” issue of RHR in 1981, the basis for the 1986 book Presenting the Past, which he edited with Susan Porter Benson and Steve Brier. Roy was heavily involved in the journal, but largely invisible when it came to bylines; beginning in the mid-1980s as half of the pseudonymous R. J. Lambrose, Roy was responsible for quite a bit of RHR’s wise-assery.
If I don’t presume to understand Roy’s original embrace of the radical historian identity, I do know what being a radical historian meant to Roy in 2000, when the RHR organized a roundtable discussion on the occasion of the journal’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Roy and his original MARHO colleagues set out to establish an alternative to the OAH and the AHA, which in the early 1970s were resistant to change. But by the late 1990s, after the initial MARHO collectives had become a distant memory and a baffling acronym, the radical historians had also managed to influence, one might even say infiltrate, those existing organizations in significant ways. “To some degree, we’re running these things” Roy said, adding: “radical historians have had a profound impact on the shape of the historical profession in the United States. It’s easy to exaggerate this, but 2000 versus 1960—it’s an unbelievable change in the kinds of people who are in it, the kinds of issues that are being discussed, the whole set of things. Well, that’s a transformation we participated in.” Given that Roy was not inclined toward exaggeration or self-aggrandizement, we should take that assessment seriously.
Since Roy tended not to toot his own horn, he did not talk on that day about his own institution building, which was an enduring part of his identity as a radical historian long after that intellectual designation had shifted its meaning. Roy understood that this was long haul, often tedious work, and he labored within universities and funding sources to nurture projects that were open and democratic, from putting archival resources on the Web for free to developing digital collecting projects and open source tools. Roy built “radical” institutions with people and funders who might be, at the least, nonplussed by that word.
Roy’s scholarship, too, was collaborative and democratic in its outlook: he explored “who built America,” how New Yorkers used Central Park, and how Americans thought about history; he guided others in creating the kind of digital projects that he helped to pioneer. And his approach to the work mirrored its content: the only book that Roy authored by himself was his first. As a mentor and colleague, Roy was unparalleled in the history profession. The MARHO Associates were only the beginning: he nurtured a far-flung network of likeminded people throughout his career, and not for nothing did Dina Copelman dub him a “one man employment agency.”
And so, “Roy as Radical Historian” encompasses virtually everything in Roy’s career: a lifelong commitment to connecting and collaborating, to working within the academy in order to expand historical scholarship beyond its borders, and to “writing” history in a myriad of ways that brought the experiences of ordinary Americans to the surface.
Thanks, Roy.
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Morning Coffee with Roy, Roy as Radical Historian""
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Like so many, I have tales to tell about Roy's generosity and intellect and unflagging, mind-boggling work ethic. I first met Roy at the beginning of my second year in graduate school; during my first year, two other students (Elena Razlogova and John Spencer) and I had developed rudimentary history cd-roms. Elena had gone on to study with Roy at GMU (and become CHNM's first employee), and as a result, John and I had been invited down to present our cd-roms at a brown bag lunch event at GMU's history department. Elena met us at the train station, and as we exited into the Washington sunlight, she led us toward a car driven by a slightly rumpled, distracted looking guy in a red button down shirt and black jeans. As the car pulled away from the curb, John and I realized that this was Roy Rosenzweig. *The* Roy Rosenzweig, respected scholar, one of the only people doing the kind of digital history to which we aspired. And he was picking up two unknown graduate students at the train station. It was an entirely appropriate way to begin; he exhibited particular generosity to those low on the academic food chain. I came to know Roy in more venues after that first day; through the <i>Radical History Review<i>, where I served as Managing Editor for two years, and through the American Social History Project, where I had the enormous privilege of working with him on a myriad of projects. While in no way officially connected with my doctoral education, Roy became a true mentor, introducing me to people I should know, and the first person I turned to for career advice.
There is so much that I will remember about Roy: his keen editorial eye (the quickest way to improve every grant proposal I ever wrote for ASHP was to run a draft past Roy); his ability to move projects forward; his deep reservoir of odd historical facts, handy for historical timelines and puzzles; the certainty that an email message to him would be returned within a matter of hours; his endearingly awkward half hugs of greeting. I'm still only barely able to acknowledge that he isn't going to be around any more, that there won't be some new project or meeting or meal at a conference or email message passing along information about a project or person I should know about. I hope that Roy had some idea of how very many people admired and loved and valued him. I guess what we do now is carry on in his spirit, the only alternative we have to carrying on in his presence.
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A Drive from Union Station
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By submitting material to Thanks, Roy you release, discharge, and agree to hold harmless Thanks, Roy and persons acting under its permission or authority, including a public library or archive to which the collection might be donated for purposes of long-term preservation, from any claims or liability arising out the Thanks, Roy\'s use of the material, including, without limitation, claims for violation of privacy, defamation, or misrepresentation.
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