Jesse Lemisch taught history for only one year at Northwestern, but it happened to be my junior year as an undergraduate (1968-69), so I was fortunate to be able to take his course. It was inspirational, probably influencing me more than any other course I took in undergrad or law school. Jesse was a pioneer in the New Left historians movement in the 1960s, which advocated studying the history of ordinary people rather than military, political, and business leaders. That seems obvious and commonplace now, but it was path-breaking at the time, especially in Early American History, which was Jesse's specialty.
His two great articles, which I read at age 19, were “The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up” and “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America." In the words of the historian Marcus Rediker, the latter was "a bombshell that blew open the gates of early American history, allowing many new historical subjects to enter." (It was later expanded and published as a book, Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York's Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution.)
If Jesse had stayed at Northwestern -- his departure, amid controversy, is another story for another time -- I might well have gone to graduate school in history rather than law school. But activism was, at the time, more attractive to me than academics.
It would be nice if I could say that I stayed in contact with Jesse over the years, as he went on to teach at Roosevelt University, SUNY Buffalo, Baruch College, and finally the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but in fact we were completely out of touch. Even when I went into academics, eventually becoming a historian of antebellum legal movements, I never wrote to Jesse or told him how much I'd appreciated his teaching.
Fortunately, Jesse somehow remembered me, and he made contact a few years ago, although in unhappy circumstances. It was after I'd started writing -- on this blog -- about my encounter with ME/CFS, which had personal meaning for him. Jesse's wife was Naomi Weisstein, a brilliant neuroscientist and also a founding member of the Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band. If you don't recognize her name, you may, if you are old enough, recognize her famous article "Kinder, Küche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female," which was included in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful.
Naomi had become ill with ME/CFS in 1984, when the disease was even more poorly understood than it is today. She was bedridden for over 30 years, while Jesse cared for her and waged an unrelenting battle to obtain decent medical treatment for her. In 1992, Jesse wrote a New York Times oped about his struggle with the health insurance industry, titled "Do They Want My Wife to Die?" It was one of the first mainstream articles that described ME/CFS as an organic illness. Jesse eventually succeeded in obtaining nursing care for Naomi, who passed away in 2015.
Anyhow, Jesse wrote to me and we began a long-delayed correspondence about ME/CFS, history, politics, and the course of our lives over the intervening decades. He was an outstanding historian, a great teacher, and ultimately a good friend. He should be most remembered, I think, for his dedication to Naomi, who had the good fortune, as these things go among ME/CFS victims, to have had Jesse at her side. Jesse described the half-century of their partnership as “filled with joy, hilarity, shared pain, total honesty, jokes told and re-told.”
This is very sad news. I encountered some of Jesse Lemisch's work, most importantly "Jack Tar in the Streets" when I was a history graduate student. Along with my fellow graduate students, I found the experience of reading the article exciting, and it reframed how I thought about early U.S. history and about approaches to history more generally.
Posted by: Robert Strassfeld | September 10, 2018 at 12:35 AM