Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Agnes Smedley

Here's a nice little bit about Agnes Smedley, journalist, activist, feminist and, apparently the McCarthyites were right, a spy for the Soviet Union. I like this piece because of the intellectual honesty of her biographer, Ruth Price, who found herself in that difficult position for any progressive- she had to name names, so to speak, after the fact. As the Soviet archives open up, the historical record is widening greatly. I agree with Price that historians should be doing a lot more with this stuff.

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