Lemisch is, of course, widely and rightly known for his work in pioneering “history from the bottom up,” which appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a new kind of social history.  He and others who helped to create this new form of “peoples’ history” (Herbert G. Gutman, Staughton Lynd, Alfred F. Young) were part of a New Left, responding to and expressing the demands for a new history then being voiced by African-Americans, students, women, and workers, as they combined in various movements for peace, justice, and power.  “History from the bottom up” thus arose as an explicit challenge to the elitist though insular traditions of historical writing within the American academy, and more specifically to the deadening “consensus” approach to the American past that had grown out of the repressive atmosphere of the Cold War.  Lemisch helped to define and to write the new, more generous, more inclusive history, and he fought (and fought hard) for its place within the discipline and profession of history and the larger society, over and against the conservative assumptions and practices that were then dominant. This he did at considerable personal cost, as he was fired by the University of Chicago in 1966.

Lemisch nonetheless continued to wage the battle for the new history in speech and in print.  His paper, “Present-Mindedness Revisited: Anti-Radicalism as a Goal of American Historical Writing Since World War II,” was the centerpiece of one of the best attended and most contentious sessions in the recent history of the American Historical Association (Washington, D.C., December 1969); it was later published as On Active Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession (Toronto: New Hogtown Press. 1975).  Its fate was to be despised by the right, ignored by the middle, and cherished by the left.  Lemisch also carried on the struggle, with wicked wit, in his own specific field of study, when in 1976 he attacked the conservative “dean” of early American historians, Bernard Bailyn, who was, Lemisch announced in the Radical History Review, “Besieged in his Bunker.”^[iii]

Lemisch also helped to internationalize American history and to make its study more sophisticated.  One means was by adapting and popularizing the work of the British Marxist historians – Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and especially E.P. Thompson, all of whom eschewed dogmatism, reductionism, determinism, and excessive abstraction in favor of a flexible, concrete humanism in the writing of politically-engaged history.  But Lemisch also went beyond these distinguished scholars in several respects. If the British Marxist historians, along with the French historians Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, had pioneered “history from below,” which made historical actors of religious radicals, rioters, peasants, and artisans, Lemisch pushed the phrase and the history further and harder with “history from the bottom up,” a more inclusive and comprehensive formulation that brought all subjects, especially slaves and women, more fully into the historian’s field of vision.  By insisting, in his research on sailors in the era of the American Revolution, upon the autonomous political hopes and demands of working people, he also went beyond the prevailing assumption among left historians that all popular movements before the great French Revolution were somehow “pre-political” or “sub-political.”  By insisting that sailors and other workers had ideas of their own, he made a point that many historians have yet to grasp – the history of the working class must be an intellectual as well as a social history.

A second way in which Lemisch has broadened and deepened the discussion of American history has been through international debate, particularly with Russian specialists in the history of the United States.  Lemisch has since the 1970s kept up a steady dialogue with Soviet/Russian scholars such as N.N. Bolkhovitinov, Vladimir Sogrin, Valeri Tischkov, Gennadi Duhovitskii, and Sergei Zhuk.  Since Lemisch’s work is well known among Russian Americanists (who for many years followed trends in left historiography closely), it came as no surprise when he was scheduled to deliver a plenary address at a major conference in Moscow in 1991.  He obliged with “American History Viewed Through a (No Longer) Red Lens: Will it be the Triumph of Capitalism, or Scholarship that Divorces Truth from Power?”  Lemisch applauded Russian historians for their “startling new beginnings” in trying to write a new, less doctrinaire history of the United States, but he also posed cautionary questions: “having bent with the Communist wind, will you now bend with the anti-Communist wind?” Or will you instead, he wondered hopefully, “write a proud new chapter in the history of the war between truth and power”?

Lemisch’s final question to the conference was but another way of saying what he has long maintained – “history from the bottom up” represents a democratization of the past and therefore the realization of one of America’s most fundamental professed values.  As he wrote in an SDS pamphlet in 1966, “History, the democrat believes, can happen from the bottom up, and the democrat as historian will write it from the bottom up.”^[iv]  Lemisch amplified this insight in what was in many respects his manifesto for a new history, “The American Revolution as Seen from the Bottom Up,” which appeared in 1967: “The American Revolution can best be re-examined from a point of view which assumes that all men [and women] are created equal, and rational, and that since they can think and reason they can make their own history. These assumptions are nothing more nor less than the democratic credo. All of our history needs re-examination from this perspective. The history of the powerless, the inarticulate, the poor has not yet begun to be written because they have been treated no more fairly by historians than they have been treated by their contemporaries.”^[v]  The class perspective “from the bottom up,” the insistence on the history-making powers of those long excluded from the history books, the explicit link between past and present, these are the fundamental ideas for which Lemisch has stood and battled, with good humor and great determination, over many years.^[vi]

 Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution was for many years something of an underground classic.  I say “underground” not only because its author has associated himself with many an underground cause, but because the work (completed at Yale University in 1962, never published, and never easy to access) has nonetheless had a vibrant, influential, fugitive existence since its appearance thirty-five years ago.  The original dissertation and the articles that grew out of it affected many, including Staughton Lynd, Alfred F. Young, and many others,^[vii] as acknowledged in Jon Wiener’s account of the rise of “radical history” in the Journal of American History and Peter Novick’s history of both historical “objectivity” and the historical profession as a whole, That Noble Dream.^[viii]  Lemisch’s influence has continued to be felt more recently, as, for example, at a conference on “Jack Tar in History” held in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1990, where Lemisch was (to his egalitarian discomfort) an intellectual and spiritual leader.^[ix]

Jack Tar vs. John Bull reads well after all these years.  Much of its lasting value arises from its extensive research and documentation; it boasts 583 endnotes in a text of modest length.  Such painstaking scholarship was necessary to Lemisch’s effort to establish new truths under the difficult circumstances of the Cold War, though of course he has always had great respect for historical evidence in its own right.  Jack Tar vs. John Bull is also judicious, often quite cautious, in its arguments, all of which are carried along in a graceful, well-written narrative.  It seems to me that its thesis about conservatives, liberals, and radicals in the unfolding of the revolutionary era remains valid and valuable to this day.

Other strengths lie in the excellent all-around account of the political and material dimensions of the sailor’s life (e.g., impressment and unemployment) which, crucially and characteristically, includes the sailor’s creative response to such conditions, his self-activity.  Lemisch’s study also contains formulations that historians are just now beginning to take up as challenges.  I have in mind here the brief but tantalizing observations about African-American sailors and the cooperation of sailors and slaves in American seaport mobs in the 1760s and 1770s, which has helped to move other scholars to address this important theme.  And there on page 55 is an arresting idea, “the folk memory of tyranny,” which should be of interest to the increasing number of historians who are working on the problem of historical memory.^[x] Jack Tar versus John Bull, in short, continues to be relevant.

Jack Tar versus John Bull is, in the end, not only an influential piece of history: it is an historical document in its own right.  It represents one of the important origins of “history from the bottom up,” which was a profoundly new approach to both past and present. Perhaps it will continue to be influential, especially to the younger historians who will form the next New Left.  It is an unusual pleasure to introduce a work and an author from which and from whom I and many others have learned so much.  Long live the classic that has now, after so many years, emerged from the underground into the light of published day!