Leon Litwack
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Leon F. Litwack is an American historian and professor of history at the University of California Berkeley. He is the 1980 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history for his book Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. [1]
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[edit] Biography
He was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1929, and received his B.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1958 from the University of California Berkeley. He has also taught at the universities of Wisconsin and South Carolina and at Colorado College.
Litwack's interest in history was sparked by The Growth of the American Republic, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager. Litwack said, "The textbook was my first confrontation with history. I asked my 11th grade teacher for the opportunity to respond to the textbook’s version of Reconstruction, to what I thought were distortions and racial biases.(I had already read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road.) The research led me to the library—and to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, with that intriguing subtitle: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Armed with that book, I presented what I thought to be a persuasive rebuttal of the textbook."[2]
Since 1964, Litwack has been teaching at the University of California Berkeley, where he has taught more than 30,000 students. [3] He is the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History. He is slated to retire at the end of the Spring Semester 2007.
He has received many honors in recognition of his distinguished and path-breaking scholarship, including the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Francis Parkman Prize, the American Book Award, and election to the presidency of the Organization of American Historians. Litwack has also been an enormously popular and influential teacher, who has received two distinguished teaching awards.[4]
He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Film Grant, with which he produced To Look for America in 1971.
In chapter 2 of North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860, Litwack showed how the federal government's pervasive support for slavery led to shameful treatment of free African Americans.[5]
Litwack is writing a sequel to Trouble in Mind focusing on black southerners and race relations from the 1930s to 1955.[6]
A distinguished lecturer with the Organization of American Historians, Litwack lectures on these topics:
- Pearl Harbor Blues: Black Americans and World War II
- Trouble in Mind: African Americans and Race Reflections from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement
- On Becoming a Historian
- To Look for America: From Hiroshima to Woodstock (an impressionistic multi-media examination of American society, with an introductory lecture on American society after 1945)
- Fight the Power: Black Americans and Race Relations after the Civil Rights Movement
[edit] Books by Leon F. Litwack (partial listing)
- Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. (1979) Winner of the 1981 National Book Award for history and the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for History.
- North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (University of Chicago Press: 1961)
- Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America edited by Hilton Als, Jon Lewis, Leon F. Litwack and James Allen. (Twin Palms Publishers: 2000) ISBN 0-944092-69-1
- The Harvard Guide to African-American History by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Darlene Clark Hine and Leon F. Litwack (editors) (Harvard Univ Press: 2001) ISBN 0-674-00276-8 Compiles information and interpretations on the past 500 years of African American history, containing essays on historical research aids, bibliographies, resources for women's issues, and an accompanying CD-ROM providing bibliographical entries.
- Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (Alfred A. Knopf: 1998)
[edit] Interview with Leon F. Litwack
[edit] Ciations
{1}Michael Les Benedict. "Review of Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, H-Law, H-Net Reviews, March, 2002. URL: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=73411015347997.
