In the middle of the day, news arrived from Duke University that the historian Lawrence Goodwyn had passed away yesterday, September 29.  I immediately began to compose a complicated post on Goodwyn that was also going to touch on the historiography of populism, Richard Hofstadter, and the divergent fates of intellectual and social history in the 1970s.  But the task I set myself proved too complicated, at least on short notice. So I’ll provide a sort of summary version.  Read more