Winthrop Jordan

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Winthrop Donaldson Jordan (1931-2007) was a renowned writer of the racial history of the United States. He was the William F. Winter Professor of History and Professor of Afro-American Studies (Emeritus) at the University of Mississippi. Jordan's best known work, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968), received the National Book Award, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize and the Bancroft Prize. He won a second Bancroft Prize for his 1993 book Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy.

Jordan was born on November 11, 1931, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He received his AB in social relations from Harvard University in 1953, his MA from Clark University, and his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1960. He was Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley, from 1963-82, and the school's Associate Dean for Minority Group Affairs Graduate Division, 1968-70.

The book, Affect & Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race, and Religion in Appreciation of Winthrop D. Jordan (ed. by David J. Libby, Paul Spickard, and Susan Ditto. University Press of Mississippi) was written by his former students.