Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Likewise, Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.
Black Indians are Native American people — defined as Native American due to being affiliated with Native American communities and being culturally Native American – who also have significant African American heritage. Many Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands, such as the Narragansett, Pequot, Wampanoag and Shinnecock, as well as people from the nations historically from the Southeast, such as Seminole, Creek and Cherokee, have a significant degree of African and often European ancestry as well.
William Shield McFeely was an American historian known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1981 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, as well as his contributions to a reevaluation of the Reconstruction era, and for advancing the field of African-American history. He retired as the Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities emeritus at the University of Georgia in 1997, and was affiliated with Harvard University since 2006.
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.
Barbara Jeanne Fields is a professor of American history at Columbia University. Her focus is on the history of the American South, 19th century social history, and the transition to capitalism in the United States.
Ira Berlin was an American historian, professor of history at the University of Maryland, and former president of Organization of American Historians.
Caroline Walker Bynum, FBA is a Medieval scholar from the United States. She is a University Professor emerita at Columbia University and Professor emerita of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She was the first woman to be appointed University Professor at Columbia. She is former Dean of Columbia's School of General Studies, served as President of the American Historical Association in 1996, and President of the Medieval Academy of America in 1997–1998.
Thomas Cleveland Holt is an American historian, who is the James Westfall Thompson Professor of American and African American History at the University of Chicago. He has produced a number of works on the people and descendants of the African Diaspora.
Nathan Irvin Huggins was a distinguished American historian, author and educator. As a leading scholar in the field of African American studies, he was W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of History and of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University as well as director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 62.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family is a 2008 book by American historian Annette Gordon-Reed. It recounts the history of four generations of the African-American Hemings family, from their African and Virginia origins until the 1826 death of Thomas Jefferson, their master and the father of Sally Hemings' children.
Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university's Faculty of Arts & Sciences. She is formerly the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Gordon-Reed is noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children.
Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice in the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the early modern Atlantic world.
Walter Johnson is an American historian, who teaches history and directs the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University.
James F. Brooks is an American historian whose work on slavery, captivity and kinship in the Southwest Borderlands was honored with major national history awards: the Bancroft Prize, Francis Parkman Prize, the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Frederick Douglass Prize. He is the Gable Professor of Early American History at the University of Georgia, and Research Professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he serves as editor of the journal The Public Historian
Philip D. Morgan is a British historian. He has specialized in Early Modern colonial British America and slavery in the Americas. In 1999, he won both the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize for his book Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998).
Rebecca Jarvis Scott is an American historian, and Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law, at University of Michigan.
Eve M. Troutt Powell is an American historian of the Middle East and North Africa, and a Professor at University of Pennsylvania in the Department of History. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
John Stauffer is Professor of English, American Studies, and African American Studies at Harvard University. He writes and lectures on the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and photography.
Native American slave ownership refers to the ownership of enslaved Africans and Native Americans by Native Americans from the pre-colonial period to the U.S. Civil War. Waves of European colonization brought enslaved Africans to North America. Responding to pressure from European settlement, some Native Americans attempted to culturally assimilate; this included slave ownership. Many prominent people from the "Five Civilized Tribes" purchased slaves from their white neighbors and became members of the planter class. All slaves in the United States were emancipated upon ratification of the 13th Amendment, just after the American Civil War.
Marla Faye Frederick, also known as Marla Frederick-McGlathery, is an American ethnographer and scholar, with focus on African-American religious experience. She is currently the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Religion and Culture at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University.
