Eugene Genovese, R.I.P.

Yesterday I lost a dear friend and the academic world lost one of its most gifted scholars and teachers: Eugene Genovese, the great historian of slavery and the American South. Although born into a Catholic family, Gene was for most of his adult life a Marxist. Under the influence of his beloved wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, an eminent historian in her own right and a late-in-life convert to the Catholic faith, he eventually returned to the Church. But even in his Marxist days, he was driven by a passion for truth—-and it was that passion that eventually brought him out of the errors into which he had been led by a passion for justice. I tell a bit of the story in the above video of a tribute to Gene I gave at a conference at Princeton held in his honor a couple of years ago.