Letters

To the Editor:

Academic Questions approaches issues and controversies in academe doubtless better than any other publication. The Summer 2014 issue (vol. 27, no. 2) lived up to expectations. But the review by Robert L. Paquette of Eugene Genovese’s scholarly work (“The Unemancipated Country: Eugene Genovese’s Discovery of the Old South”) did not escape the apparent limitations of that work. I say “apparent” because I am not familiar with it and depended upon this article for whatever insights it had, and they were numerous.

But I was troubled by the gross misunderstanding of what Paquette rightly called the “the most resonant passage in the Declaration of Independence,” and his citing of John C. Calhoun, as well as Genovese, as authorities:

For any class of workers, Genovese stressed, slaves, peasants, serfs, or wage-earners, any order is preferable to no order at