UpDate - Vol. 13, No. 8, Page 1
October 21, 1993
To rave reviews; Historian focuses on slavery

     Peter Kolchin, professor of history at the University, has recently
published his third book, American Slavery 1619-1877.
     Since its appearance on Aug. 31, the volume has received widespread
attention, including reviews in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The
New York Times Book Review and Newsday.
     "No history book published this year is more important to
understanding America's past and present than this concise, well-written
and sensibly argued survey of America's greatest shame," a reviewer wrote
in The New Yorker.
     "In recent years so much new scholarship has been done on slavery that
summary and synthesis are badly need; these Kolchin quite brilliantly
provides," Jonathan Yardley wrote in The Washington Post. "For the lay
reader as for the historian, 'American Slavery' is nothing less than
essential."
     In his preface, Kolchin writes, "...the sheer volume of historical
work on slavery has become so vast that keeping up with it is a task of
Herculean proportions even for experts in the field. For everyone else, it
is simply impossible.
     "Despite the proliferation of this scholarly research, we still lack a
volume that pulls together what we have learned to present a coherent
history of slavery in America.
     "...I believe that it is time to step back and consider where we now
stand-where historians agree and disagree, what we have learned and what
remains to be learned-and on the basis of this consideration to present a
short interpretive survey of American slavery."
     In a recent interview, Kolchin said he wrote the book "because it
didn't exist and was crying out to be written.
     "It presents American slavery in a comparative context. There has been
a huge amount of specialized research on slavery in the past 25 years or
so, but most of that research is not accessible to the general reading
public," he said.
     "I've attempted to synthesize and bring together in short, readable
form an interpretive synthesis of American slavery, from its beginning
through emancipation and reconstruction.
     "Much of the research and writing that has been done has been very
time specific and geographically focused. This book brings together large
amounts of disparate research into one sweeping narrative. Hopefully, it
will be of interest both to people who don't know much about slavery at all
and people who are experts," he said.
     Kolchin said he tried to present a balanced account and tried to be
objective while, at the same time, presenting his own interpretation of
what slavery was like. At the same time, he said, he did not avoid taking a
stance on certain issues.
     One of those issues centers on historians paying more attention to the
behavior of the masters than to that of the slaves.
     "Until the 1960s, historians typically portrayed slaves as objects of
white treatment rather than as subjects in their own right. These
historians focused on what slave owners did to slaves," Kolchin said.
     "In the past 25 years or so, historians have focused more and more on
the actions of the slaves themselves-their culture, community, families and
values-and on the ways in which they helped make their own world. It's been
a very healthy corrective to what we had before. But, at the same time,
some historians have taken the process too far and have written of slave
life with insufficient attention to slavery itself.
     "It is important not to lose sight of the fact that slaves were not
only historical agents, but also victims of a brutal, dehumanizing
institution."
     A member of the Delaware faculty since 1985, Kolchin also has taught
at the universities of California at Davis, Wisconsin at Madison and New
Mexico. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard.
     Kolchin's other books include First Freedom: The Responses of
Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction (l972) and Unfree
Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987), for which he won the
prestigious Bancroft Prize in American history from Columbia University,
the Avery O. Craven Award of the Organization of American Historians and
the Charles S. Sydnor Award of the Southern Historical Association.
     Kolchin earned his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1970.
                                                  -Beth Thomas