The History of Herbert Aptheker: Partisanship’s Threat to Truth-telling
The History of Herbert Aptheker: Partisanship’s Threat to Truth-telling

Summary/Abstract: Communist theoretician Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) was the rare American writer whose history books were approved for mass consumption in the Communist bloc. A Columbia University Ph.D., he wrote or edited more than fifty books and lectured widely, but never held a professorship, due solely to his Communist politics. This paper explores the convergence of his academic interests and revolutionary commitment and argues that it justified the decades-long exclusion of Aptheker from the profession. His idiosyncratic view of truth as a function of „partisanship with the oppressed“ ironically condemns defenders of Stalinist regimes such as he was. Its methodological implications should inform the evaluation of his historical writings, no matter how much some of them may have inspired generations of African Americans.

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