An historian with a deep-seated passion for his area of research and a long-time enthusiasm for teaching, Peter R. Kolchin, Henry Clay Reed Professor of History, was named the 2002 winner of the Francis Alison Award, the University's highest faculty honor.

The award, announced in November at the annual Named Professors Dinner, includes $6,000 and a medal. Established by the University's Board of Trustees in 1978, it recognizes the scholarship, professional achievements and dedication of the UD faculty.

This spring, Kolchin becomes the first recipient to deliver what will be known as the annual Alison Lecture.

In announcing the award, President David P. Roselle said, "Peter Kolchin is an accomplished historian and the author of numerous books and articles on American slavery, the Civil War and emancipation. He is a 2002-03 Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians. We hold Peter and his scholarship in the highest regard."

Provost Dan Rich also praised Kolchin, saying, "Dr. Kolchin continues the legacy of scholarship and mentorship begun by Dr. Alison, as he is recognized as one of the nation's leading historians and an esteemed scholar in the history of slavery. Peter Kolchin is equally adept at translating his scholarly insights into lessons in his classroom, where he demonstrates exceptional skills as a teacher."

Inspired by undergraduate and graduate professors and the climate of the 1960s, Kolchin says he became fascinated with Southern history during his days as a student at Columbia and Johns Hopkins universities.

Always the scholar, he is, of course, careful to point out that something is only "Southern" if it is compared to things "not Southern."

In explaining his early interest, he says, "In some ways, the civil rights movement of the 1960s was a second period of reconstruction for the South. It was a very exciting period that held the possibility for major change. Setting up a more integrated society held all sorts of possibilities, all kinds of drama."

At the same time Kolchin was marching on Washington and hearing Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, he was being influenced by professors who studied the original reconstruction period after the Civil War. Kolchin's first book, First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction, an expansion of his thesis, was about that period. He then moved backward into what would become a large portion of his life's work--American slavery.

"Once you study a period of history, as I did with emancipation, you develop a curiosity about how it all came to be," he says.

In his second book, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, Kolchin began weaving the second strong thread of his research--the comparative side. The book, published in 1987 by Harvard University Press, won the Charles S. Sydnor Award of the Southern Historical Association, Columbia University's Bancroft Prize in American History and the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians.

In the book, Kolchin compares and contrasts the two systems of bondage. "Russian serfdom was like slavery but different," he says. "Each evolved in different environments. The American system was race-based, but ethnicity made little difference in the Russian system. Both evolved in a similar time frame and both were ended about the same time. He points out that, in the Southern U.S., abolition came violently through the Civil War. In Russia, it came peacefully by proclamation of the czar.

Kolchin is now working on a sequel, a companion volume that will focus on emancipation and its aftermath.

"I am interested in comparing these two emancipations going on at the same time. What happened to people who were owned? What replaced bondage?

"In both countries, emancipation began with enormous excitement and hope, with a feeling of reform, and in just a few years, both experienced a profound sense of disillusionment. In the U.S., Jim Crow laws were enacted, and in Russia, the government became preoccupied with 'the peasant question,' which supposedly had been resolved forever by emancipation. There was an increasing despair in the lives of former slaves and serfs, and former masters were unhappy, angry and humiliated. Like many other post-emancipation societies, Russia and the United States were gripped by a pervasive sense of things gone wrong."

Kolchin published his third book, American Slavery: 1619-1877, in 1993 and has completed a revised version that is due out next year.

A review in The New Yorker of the original work called it "a miraculous achievement," adding, "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."

The book's intent, Kolchin says, "is to show the whole sweep of American slavery, to synthesize an enormous amount of historical research--mostly specialized--and bring it all together and tell it in a short, interpretive survey." The book, he adds, was designed to reach both those who knew little about slavery and those who knew a great deal but needed to see the overall picture.

"Most research," he explains, "is narrowly focused and does not take into account how American slavery evolved and changed.

"For example," he says, "in the late pre-Civil War period, the time most written about, Christianity played a major role in the lives of American slaves. That was not the case in the
17th century before slaves were converted."

Similarly, Kolchin explains, "by the 19th century, the majority of slaves were born in the U.S. In Colonial times, many slaves were born in Africa and brought their culture with them. There is a great deal of difference between being born into slavery as a fourth-generation American and being imported to America from Africa as a first-generation slave."

The revised edition of American Slavery will incorporate "the vast amount of research conducted in the last decade," Kolchin says.

"There has been an extraordinary boom in research on American slavery. The field has been very much in flux. It is very exciting. The centrality of slavery to the history of the United States raises all sorts of fundamental questions about the nature of American society and American values."

Kolchin's latest work, a book called A Sphinx on the American Land: The 19th-Century South in Comparative Perspective, is due out this year. The collection of analytical essays is based on the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures he gave two years ago at Louisiana State University.

The book has already been called "an elegant, profound volume [that] proves Kolchin to be one of the stellar Southern historians of his generation."

In it, he compares the South with the un-South (the North) and then explores the "many Souths," reminding readers that there never has been one archetypal South or Southerner. He also compares the South with "other Souths"--that is, regions outside the United States that share some of the same characteristics as the American South.

The book is being published by Louisiana State University Press.

Among Kolchin's many honors are fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warrn Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University and the Institute for Southern History at Johns Hopkins University.

--Beth Thomas