Review

General Books

James Green's collection of essays about what he calls "movement history"—historical accounts of movements for social justice in the United States—reveals his enthusiasm for and commitment to history from "the bottom up." In an unabashedly passionate tone, Green combines history and autobiography as he reflects on thirty years as a participant, scholar, and teacher of progressive and radical social movements. His reflections are a refreshing antidote to what historian Leon Fink has termed the "powers of historical pessimism" that affect fellow colleagues in the profession (p.11). Divided into three parts, the book covers Green's experiences with movement history: practicing it as a labor historian, bringing it to the public in a variety of ways, and using it to inform and inspire current struggles for social change. Throughout the years, he has sought to link academic and public history, America's past and present.	1
In "Practicing Movement History," Green discusses his engagement with New Left-inspired radical history beginning in the late 1960s. He discovered movement history as a graduate student within the political context of his participation in the student and antiwar movements. Along with a generation of historians, he became interested in history from "the bottom up," that is the history of those groups in American society, such as the working class, racial minorities, and women, excluded from the traditional narrative of United States history. He, too, began to see his scholarly endeavors as part of a search for a "usable past" for contemporary movements involving those groups. His writings for Radical America, outreach projects to audiences of workers and union members, and position as a labor educator at the University of Massachusetts in Boston all aimed to go beyond the confines of the academic world to convey the history and politics of past social movements to a broader public. Green's recollections remind us of how contested and transformative the perspective of New Left historians was in the 1960s and 1970s.	2
"Telling Movement Stories in Public" details Green's forays into the field of public history. Motivated by a desire to shape popular historical consciousness, he has utilized a variety of forums to make history accessible to the public, including helping to create the public television film documentary "The Great Depression," broadcast in 1993. Produced by Henry Hampton and his Blackside, Inc.—the same company that made the "Eyes on the Prize" series about the Civil Rights Movement—the documentary offered Green a unique opportunity to work with filmmakers and to see the possibilities and limitations of presenting history on film. Documentary filmmakers' reliance on existing newsreel footage and live witnesses, and time constraints which prevent comprehensive coverage, led to changes and compromises Green would not have made had he been writing a book. Yet, he gained from this experience a strong sense of the power of historical narrative, a necessity for any attempt to translate history to the public. After all, a good story makes an audience care about the subject, and Green urges us to tell "stories that touch the heart as well as the intellect" (199).	3
With "Learning from Movement History," Green looks at how past labor and civil rights struggles can guide present ones. For example, in the 1990s, when trade unionists in the AFL-CIO sponsored "Union Summer," a program that recruits and trains young people to be labor organizers and places them in the field for a summer, they revived the organizing tradition that characterized the labor movement before World War II and drew upon the model used by the Civil Rights Movement for Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. Green stresses that current activists can learn from what went right and wrong in earlier movements. More than nostalgic celebrations of moments of solidarity and success, looking to history also means interrogating past incidents of conflict and defeat. What is most remarkable about this book is the way in which Green handles autobiography. His willingness to reflect honestly on his experiences, to inform readers of his mistakes and what he learned from them—particularly with regard to his efforts at public history—makes this book especially useful and engaging; in fact, the chapters in which Green is less central to the story are less so. Of great use for upper-division courses in public and labor history, Taking History to Heart also would work well in an introductory graduate seminar as a way to familiarize students with a critical but hopeful perspective on the current state of the historical profession.	4
University of Northern Colorado   Jennifer Frost

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