>>Ex-Marxist turned neo-Confederate Eugene Genovese,
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>A very nicely turned phrase... very true...
In case people think I'm exaggerating, I'm not. Both Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have gotten quite close to the magazine Southern Partisan, which is one of the more genteel organs of the neo-Confederate movement. They've been lovingly interviewed by SP, and have also written for the pub. They jointly wrote an obit for M.E. Bradford, a reactionary Texan whom Ronald Reagan tried to appoint to head the National Endowment for the Humanities early in his first term; Bradford was too much for Congress to take even in the heady early days of the Reagan revolution. The current issue of Chronicles of Culture, a journal published by the paleoconservative Rockford Institute (which can be thought of as the high theoretical wing of Buchananism), has an ad for a book by Chronicles' managing editor, Theodore Pappas, called Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Other Prominent Americans. It's billed as the "revised and expanded edition of The Martin Luther King, Jr., Plagiarism Story," and has a "new foreword by Eugene Genovese." A blurb from that foreword reproduced in the ad says "this brave book deserves a wide reading." Now it may be true that King was a plagiarist, but he's a historical figure not as a scholar but as a political leader, and only someone who wanted to discredit his political legacy would say something like "this brave book deserves a wide reading."
Doug