Along with the late distinguished historian Ira Berlin, my colleagues and I at CUNY's American Social History Project (ASHP) had the privilege of being the people who worked most closely with Herb Gutman in the final half-dozen years of his all-too-short life and career. In his final years, as he had for much of the previous three decades of his work, Herb remained deeply committed to questioning accepted historical truths and using new methodologies to transform historical analysis and to popularize the writing of American history for a broad public audience. In pursuit of these connected goals, Gutman constantly posed difficult questions about the past to his colleagues, collaborators, and students: What are the proper subjects of historical inquiry? How can we conduct the most effective scholarly research? How do we evaluate and best present the results of that research? In addition to being an innovative scholar, Herb was also...
Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On
STEPHEN BRIER is a social, labor, and education historian who worked at the City University of New York for more than four decades before retiring in 2022. With the late Herbert Gutman, Brier cofounded in 1980 CUNY's American Social History Project (ASHP), which he led as executive director for nearly two decades. He served as executive producer/coauthor/editor of the ASHP's award-winning Who Built America? multimedia curriculum, which included books, videos, CD-ROMs, and a forthcoming Open Educational Resource, as well as several websites, notably History Matters, the September 11 Digital Archive, and the CUNY Digital History Archive. Brier taught the history of public education in the Urban Education PhD program at the CUNY Graduate Center and labor history at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies for a dozen years. He published numerous articles in academic journals on the intersection of race and class in US history as well as a number of newspaper editorials on the crisis of public education. His most recent book, coauthored with Michael Fabricant, is Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education (2016). Brier is currently working on a monograph on the fight for educational equity in New York City in the 1960s, focusing on community control battles in the NYC public schools and the open-admissions struggle at CUNY.
Stephen Brier; Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On. Labor 1 May 2023; 20 (2): 95–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329834
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