Peter Kolchin

Last updated
Peter Kolchin
Born
Peter Robert Kolchin

(1943-06-03) June 3, 1943 (age 81)
New York, U.S.
Education Columbia University (AB)
Johns Hopkins University (PhD)
OccupationHistorian
Awards Bancroft Prize (1988)

Peter Robert Kolchin [1] (born June 3, 1943) is an American historian. He has specialized in slavery and labor in the American South before and after the Civil War, and in comparisons with Russian serfdom and other forms of labor. He won the Bancroft Prize in American History and the Avery O. Craven Award for his book Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987).

Contents

Life

Born in New York, Peter Kolchin attended local schools. He graduated from Columbia University with an A.B. in 1964, [2] and conducted graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1970. His doctoral thesis was entitled First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction. [1]

He is a professor at the University of Delaware. [3]

Awards

Works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emancipation Proclamation</span> 1862 executive order by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln freeing slaves in the South

The Emancipation Proclamation, officially Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War. The Proclamation had the effect of changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free. As soon as slaves escaped the control of their enslavers, either by fleeing to Union lines or through the advance of federal troops, they were permanently free. In addition, the Proclamation allowed for former slaves to "be received into the armed service of the United States". The Emancipation Proclamation played a significant part in the end of slavery in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution</span> 1865 Reconstruction amendment

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abolitionism</span> Movement to end slavery

Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery and liberate slaves around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Serfdom</span> Status of peasants under feudalism

Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery. It developed during late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slavery in the United States</span>

The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slave states and free states</span> Historical division of United States in which slavery was legal or not

In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the internal or domestic slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were prohibited. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states, so new states were admitted in slave–free pairs. There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Clause of the U.S. Constitution, as implemented by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, provided that a slave did not become free by entering a free state and must be returned to his or her owner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Foner</span> American historian (born 1943)

Eric Foner is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and historiography, and has been a member of the faculty at the Columbia University Department of History since 1982. He is the author of several popular textbooks. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Foner is the most frequently cited author on college syllabi for history courses. According to historian Timothy Snyder, Foner is the first to associate the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 with section three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Serfdom in Russia</span> Unfree peasant class of Tsarist Russia

The term serf, in the sense of an unfree peasant of tsarist Russia, meant an unfree person who, unlike a slave, historically could be sold only together with the land to which they were "attached". However, this stopped being a requirement by the 19th century, and serfs were practically indistinguishable from slaves. Contemporary legal documents, such as Russkaya Pravda, distinguished several degrees of feudal dependency of peasants. While another form of slavery in Russia, kholopstvo, was ended by Peter I in 1723, the serfdom was abolished only by Alexander II's emancipation reform of 1861; nevertheless, in times past, the state allowed peasants to sue for release from serfdom under certain conditions, and also took measures against abuses of landlord power.

Steven Howard Hahn is Professor of History at New York University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David W. Blight</span> American historian (born 1949)

David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

In the United States, a freedmen's town was an African American municipality or community built by freedmen, formerly enslaved people who were emancipated during and after the American Civil War. These towns emerged in a number of states, most notably Texas. They are also known as freedom colonies, from the title of a book by Sitton and Conrad.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ira Berlin</span> American historian

Ira Berlin was an American historian, professor of history at the University of Maryland, and former president of Organization of American Historians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibliography of the Reconstruction era</span> Eras main scholarly literature (1863–1877)

This is a selected bibliography of the main scholarly books and articles of Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, 1863–1877.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timeline of abolition of slavery and serfdom</span>

The abolition of slavery occurred at different times in different countries. It frequently occurred sequentially in more than one stage – for example, as abolition of the trade in slaves in a specific country, and then as abolition of slavery throughout empires. Each step was usually the result of a separate law or action. This timeline shows abolition laws or actions listed chronologically. It also covers the abolition of serfdom.

The history of slavery in Alaska differs from that of the other states that comprise the United States. Whereas the contiguous United States mostly saw enslavement of Africans originating from across the Atlantic Ocean, in Alaska indigenous people, and some whites, enslaved indigenous people from other tribes.

Brian Kelly is an American historian and a lecturer in US history, teaching at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. His work is concerned mainly with labor and race in the American South, although much of his most recent scholarship focuses on the formative struggles around slave emancipation during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era that followed.

Serfdom has a long history that dates to ancient times.

Adam Gachet, sometimes written Adam Gashet, was a Baptist minister and state legislator in Alabama. He represented Barbour County, Alabama. He was enslaved until 1865. He is commemorated on a historical marker listing state legislators in Alabama who were African American and served during the Reconstruction era.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">End of slavery in the United States</span>

From the late-18th to the mid-19th century, various states of the United States allowed the enslavement of human beings, most of whom had been transported from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade or were their descendants. The institution of chattel slavery was established in North America in the 16th century under Spanish colonization, British colonization, French colonization, and Dutch colonization.

This bibliography of slavery in the United States is a guide to books documenting the history of slavery in the U.S., from its colonial origins in the 17th century through the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which officially abolished the practice in 1865. In addition, links are provided to related bibliographies and articles elsewhere in Wikipedia.

References

  1. 1 2 "Doctors of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences". Conferring of Degrees at the close of the ninety-fourth academic year (PDF). Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University. May 27, 1970. p. 52. Retrieved 2020-11-04.
  2. "Columbia College Today". www.college.columbia.edu. Retrieved 2022-06-01.
  3. "University of Delaware - Department of History - Kolchin". www.udel.edu. Archived from the original on 2006-06-03.