Herbert Aptheker
Birthday	Saturday, July 31, 1915
Birthplace	Brooklyn, New York
Died	Monday, March 17, 2003
Occupation	Marxist historian, editor, activist

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Aptheker, Herbert

Born 1915. American historian and publicist. Member of the Communist Party of the USA.

Aptheker taught history at the Jefferson School of Social Science for several years. Editor-in-chief of the progressive magazine Political Affairs from 1957 through 1963, he became director of the American Institute of Marxist Research in 1964. Aptheker’s main works are devoted to the history of the Negro people. He reestablished the true picture of dozens of uprisings that shook the slaveholding South and showed the heroic struggle of the Negroes during the Civil War in the USA (1861–65). He is also author of publicist works that exposed the reactionary nature of the contemporary bourgeois conception of history (for example, Laureates of Imperialism, translated from English, Moscow, 1955).

WORKS

Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. New York, 1951.
The Negro in the Civil War. New York, 1938.
Negro Slave Revolts in the United States, 1526–1860. New York, 1939.
The Negro in the Abolitionist Movement. New York, 1941.
To Be Free: Studies in American Negro History. New York, 1948.
Toward Negro Freedom. New York, 1956.
In Russian translation:
Istoriia amerikanskogo naroda, vols. 1–2. Moscow, 1961–62.
O sushchnosti svobody. Moscow, 1961.
Amerikanskii negr segodnia. Moscow, 1963.
Vneshniaia politika SShA i “kholodnaia voina.” Moscow, 1963.

I. P. DEMENT’EV

References in periodicals archive

Du Bois, W.E.B, Herbert Aptheker (Ed.), The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960, (Monthly Review Press: NY, 1973).

Introduction: Warrior/Queen Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, A Legacy of Intellectual Brilliance and Perfect Love

Not incidentally, it was a Marxist, Herbert Aptheker, and a convert to Marxism, W.E.B.

Up from slavery

(1.) Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1993), pp.

Black slaves who could have been American founders

This reviewer can recommend this book to those who agree with Young that Herbert Aptheker was one of the most notable historians of the twentieth century.

Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding

Several FSM leaders emerged directly out of the old left, notably Bettina Aptheker, daughter of renowned Communist historian Herbert Aptheker and herself a member of the Du Bois Club.

Robert Cohen, Freedom's Orator: Maria Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s

Remembering the outcry from disciples of the Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker when his daughter Bettina Aptheker, in her memoir, Intimate Politics (2006), revealed that he had abused her, I wonder.

Incest and epidemiology

Herbert Aptheker. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973.

Education reform vs. American history: current reforms not only damage our students' learning, they arise from a perspective that claims a different purpose for education than was put forth by earlier reformers

Nevertheless, even before the book was published, a controversy developed over the validity of a memory so stowed away that it was to provoke mental breakdowns, attempted suicides, and anxiety attacks, Bettina, an only child and, on the surface, a perfect beloved clone of her righteous communist parents, carried a suppressed memory of childhood sexual molestation by her father, the famous Marxist historian, Herbert Aptheker. Before I read the book, the furor around this caused me to think that its topic was sexual abuse.

Historical Life Stories

A revolutionary, workingclass Turner also appeared in publications by communist writers, most notably Herbert Aptheker, whose scholarship on slave rebellion challenged the moon-light-and-magnolia nostalgia that had been flourishing for generations in academe.

The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory

To get a more historical perspective, I love the works of Herbert Aptheker. In particular, volume two of A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: From Reconstruction to the Founding of the NAACP (Carol Pub.

Listening to the muses: Phylicia Rashad and LisaGay Hamilton reflect on how the voices of many writers spark their acting

Davis' source to Herbert Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts, where she read about another woman who was taking in runaway slaves.

Examining slavery in song: 'Dessa Rose' depicts an unlikely friendship in the antebellum South