Talk:Herbert Aptheker
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[edit] POV suspect
The article has slanted POV in at least two ways:
(1) It appears to overstate Aptheker's contribution to American historiography. In particular, I doubt that Aptheker's historical work on Black history (the excellence of which I am not disputing) single-handledly "demolished" previous accounts of Southern history that were biased for the Confederacy and racist, as the article suggests. What about the work of other historians of Black America, such as John Hope Franklin, who were Aptheker's contemporaries?
(2) The article ignores the most controversial aspects of Aptheker's Communist Party affiliation, and also ignores his later well-publicized break with the Party. Aptheker spent much of his political career as a Soviet apologist, generating particular fame for his publication "The Truth About Hungary," which -- contrary even to the views of Communist Party USA leadership at the time -- defended the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. Aptheker penned a similar apologia for the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Yet Aptheker later recanted these apologetics and became involved with a pro-Gorbachev Communist Party group known as the Committees of Correspondence. See generally [1].
I have not attempted edits because I do not have access to good primary source materials. However, edits to solve these problems would improve the article substantially.
