He was the chair of the Department of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara from 1988 to 1993 and the director of the Center for Black Studies (1990–1991).
In the 1990s, he was the host of WBAI-FM's Behind the News and Monday Talk Back.
From 2013 to date, Horne has discussed his historical, socio-economic and political research findings in a series of conversations with Paul Jay.
As of 2022 to the present, Horne has frequently appeared on the De Facto Podcast with Anthony Ballas to discuss his historiographical, political, economic, and cultural analyses for a series dedicated to his life and work.
Horne has published extensively on W. E. B. Du Bois and has written books on neglected episodes of world history including Hawaii and the Pacific. He writes about topics he perceives as misrepresented struggles for justice; in particular communist struggles and struggles against imperialism, colonialism, fascism, racism, and white supremacy. Horne is a Marxist. Much of his work highlights and analyzes specific individuals in their historical contexts, including figures such as the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter John Howard Lawson, Ferdinand Smith (a Jamaican-born communist, sailor, labor leader, and co-founder of the National Maritime Union), and Lawrence Dennis, a man described as "the brains behind American fascism".
While many of Horne's books use an individual as a prism to inspect the historical forces of their times, Horne has also produced broad canvas chronicles of infrequently examined periods and aspects of the history of white supremacy and imperialism. For example, he has written on the post-civil war involvement of the US ruling class—newly dispossessed of human chattels—in relation to slavery in Brazil, which was not legally abolished until 1888. He has also written on the historic relationships between African Americans and the Japanese in the mid-20th century, specifically examining the ways in which the Japanese state gained sympathy and solidarity from people of colour by positioning themselves as the leaders of a global war against white supremacy.
One of Horne's more notable claims is that the American Revolution was, contrary to conventional Marxist theory which identifies it as a bourgeois revolution, a counter-revolution whose primary goal was to counteract the anticipated abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Horne has applied this framework of counter-revolution to other conflicts as well, including the Glorious Revolution (in his account, a revolt of merchants seeking to overcome the Royal African Company's regulations on slavery), the Texas Revolution (a rebellion against the Mexican government's anti-slavery stance and ambivalent indigenous policy), and the American Civil War. According to David Waldstreicher, Horne's framework aims to develop a "grand theory of US history" as a series of devastating counter-revolutions which continue into the present.
Manning Marable has said: "Gerald Horne is one of the most gifted and insightful historians on racial matters of his generation."
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Horne published an article which attributed the invasion to NATO enlargement, imperialism, and pro-Western regime change in Ukraine.
Historiography in and for the radical tradition
At the Black Women and the Radical Tradition conference held at the Brooklyn College Graduate Center for Worker Education, in a session devoted to Shirley Graham Du Bois, he said:
The purpose of my brief remarks this afternoon is to use the life and times of Shirley Graham Du Bois as a vehicle for trying to understand how and why we need to think about revitalizing the radical tradition through the means of revisioning and rewriting our history, our past. I argue in these remarks that like other historians – for Shirley Graham Du Bois was among other things an historian – she tended to stress in her history writing, like most of the writers of her generation, the "Crispus Attucks" aspect of our history, I'm sure you're familiar with Crispus Attucks, he goes down in history as the first person to be slain in the uprising against British rule in then-British North America and a symbol of how black people have shed their blood to help to construct this country. Which of course is true and is accurate. But it only begins to tell part of the story, as I'll try to elaborate on in my remarks. I think today it's particularly important to talk about revitalizing our past so that we can reinvigorate the radical tradition in light of this precipitous downturn that we see in the capitalist economy. Newsweek has been amongst the many journals that have told us "We're All Socialists Now", which some might be surprised to hear. In Latin America, certainly in the most recent election in El Salvador, and in Latin American generally, one can easily espy a shift to the left. The quipsters are suggesting that the recently departed Pres. George W. Bush entered office in 2001 as a social conservative but then after being compelled to nationalize various enterprises he leaves office as a conservative socialist. When you note that in South Africa you have a Communist Party minister sitting in office in Pretoria, and perhaps the same will take place in New Delhi, after the elections that take place in the late spring, it's time to revive that aspect it seems to me reality is shouting at us, time to revitalize that aspect of black history that stresses our ancestors who as early as the 18th century were actually trying to overthrow the government of the United States of America, as opposed to shedding their blood to help to create the government of the United States of America.
In a speech given at an event marking the depositing of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University, Horne remarked at length on the writing of history, its importance, and what he perceives as the grievous proliferation of propagandistic historiography in the US:
Now it is often said that every generation has to rewrite history. For example, at one time there was a prevalent "moonlight and magnolias" version of slavery and Reconstruction that fundamentally portrayed "happy Negroes" during the slave era and portrayed the period following slavery as a dastardly period of Negro misrule and corruption. This began to change in the 1930s with the publication of Du Bois' magisterial 'Black Reconstruction' and changed decisively with the publication of Eric Foner's 'Reconstruction.'"
One of the reasons why I personally – and I daresay future generations – are so pleased by the depositing of these CPUSA archives is because it is painfully obvious that the history of the Communist movement in this nation is long overdue for a massive rewriting and these archives will prove indispensable in that process.
It is easy to see why future generations will be displeased with much of the present history that has been written to this point about the Communist Party because it has been incredibly biased, one-sided, deeply influenced by the conservative drift of the nation – not unlike pre-Du Bois histories of Reconstruction – and, fundamentally, anticommunist.
Works
Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War. SUNY Press (1986)
Co-Editor, "Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-First Century". New York: Oxford University Press (2008)Horne, Gerald (2004). Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire. New York University Press. ISBN9780814736418. JSTORj.ctt9qg215. (2004)
Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920. New York University Press (2005)
Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music. Monthly Review Press (2019)
White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela. International Publishers (2019)
"W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, with Charisse Burden-Stelly". Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO (2019)
The Bittersweet Science: Racism, Racketeering, and the Political Economy of Boxing. International Publishers (2020)
The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism. International Publishers (2022)
Revolting Capital: Racism & Radicalism in Washington D.C., 1900–2000. International Publishers (2023)
"Acknowledging Radical Histories: Conversations With Gerald Horne, (with Chris Steele)". New York: International Publisher (2023)
Armed Struggle? Panthers and Communists; Black Nationalists and Liberals in Southern California through the Sixties and Seventies. International Publishers (2024)
"I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader". OR Books (2024)
The Capital of Slavery: Washington, D.C. 1800–1865. International Publishers (2025)
"Blows Against the Empire: U.S. Imperialism in Crisis" (2nd ed.). International Publishers (2025)
"The Counter-Revolution of 1893: The Hawaii Coup and the Roots of U.S. Imperialism in the Asia-Pacific Basin". New York: International Publishers (2026)
"Slavery, the Slave Trade and the Roots of U.S. Imperialism". International Publishers (2026)
On The Global Civil Rights Struggle at the conference, The Long Civil Rights Movement: Histories, Politics, Memories, given by the Southern Oral History Program, April 2–4, 2009 (Video)
