Seizing power from below
When Linda Gordon realized she “wasn’t good enough” to make it as a professional dancer, she hung up her ballet slippers and headed to college. There, she fell in love with the past. Now an award-winning author and historian, she is working on a book about social movements of the 20th century while she’s a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The turn from dance to history is just one of many professional shifts for Gordon during a long and accomplished career. Her early academic epiphany came at the hands of an inspiring teacher who unlocked her passion for history with classes on the French Revolution and modern Russia. “I owe a whole set of interests to him,” said Gordon, who graduated from Swarthmore College in 1961 with a history degree and pursued doctoral studies in Russian history at Yale University. But while in the Soviet Union working on her thesis...