TrueBlue

I’m Warren Goldstein, a professor of history at the University of Hartford, where I’m also Chair of the History Department.I write books and articles, essays, opinion pieces, and book reviews that use history to better understand modern life. As an American historian, I cover a fair amount of territory. My first book was a social and cultural history of baseball’s early years. My next, co-authored with Elliott Gorn, was a general interpretive history of American sports. Most recently I published a biography of the late civil rights and anti-war activist preacher William Sloane Coffin, Jr. (All are still in print.)

I also write about modern sports controversies, especially those involving baseball; how history is treated in movies and plays; and about liberal religion and liberal education.

So since there are already lots of terrific liberal bloggers, who’ve had a real effect on recent electoral politics, you might be wondering, “why another blog?”

For more than twenty-five years I’ve been studying, writing, and teaching about American history—and I love my work. That I get paid to read and think and write and teach makes me one of the luckier people alive.

But there’s a big difference between what historians do in our classrooms and in our professional writing and popular understandings of history. Most historians, alas, write only for other professors and the occasional graduate student. We leave popular history to novels, movies, and television specials, and then complain that their history is too melodramatic, simplistic, and sentimental. Politicans and media types serve up dangerous and misleading ideas under the guise of historical lessons–especially when it comes to justifying wars or tax cuts or restricting civil liberties or justifying torture.

I try to bridge the huge gap between academia and the larger reading public by writing articles, essays, and reviews for newspapers and magazines–and by doing a good bit of public speaking, all of which I really enjoy. But bloggers have created a new kind of conversation, while making themselves important sources of information and centers of influence. Academics like me (those of us who want conversations with the larger public) have a responsibility, I think, to put our own ideas to the test.

Why TrueBlue?

Well, I know there are smart, interesting, insightful conservatives, but the truth is that everything important I’ve learned intellectually or politically has come from the other side of the aisle, the blue side. So I’m blue through and through. I’ve never even voted for a conservative for anything. Conservatives, with few exceptions (there are always exceptions) have fought for the wrong side of every major issue in the history of this country: slavery, unions, the rights of women, African-Americans, and gays and lesbians.

But that doesn’t mean we blue types always have a lock on truth. The liberal record could be a lot better. We’ve got to deepen our understanding and sharpen our thoughts, and I intend TrueBlue as a contribution to that process.