Nathan Huggins
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
, 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
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
as well as director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute
W. E. B. Du Bois Institute
The W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research is located at Harvard University and was established in 1969. It is named after W. E. B. Du Bois who was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University...
for Afro-American Research. Born in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
in 1927, he died in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
December 5, 1989.
Education
Huggins studied at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving his A.B. degree in 1954 and M.A. in 1955. He studied at Harvard UniversityHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, where he received his A.M. in 1957 and Ph.D. in history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
in 1962.
Academic Life
Huggins held assistant professorships at California State University, Long BeachCalifornia State University, Long Beach
California State University, Long Beach is the second largest campus of the California State University system and the third largest university in the state of California by enrollment...
, Lake Forest College
Lake Forest College
Lake Forest College, founded in 1857, is a private liberal arts college in Lake Forest, Illinois. The college has 1,500 students representing 47 states and 78 countries....
(Illinois), and the University of Massachusetts at Boston
University of Massachusetts Boston
The University of Massachusetts Boston, also known as UMass Boston, is an urban public research university and the second largest campus in the five-campus University of Massachusetts system. The university is located on on Harbor Point in the City of Boston, Massachusetts, United States...
. He served as visiting associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley before joining the faculty at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
as a professor of history in 1970. Ten years later, Huggins accepted positions as the first W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies and Director of the Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. He also taught outside the U.S. at the University of Heidelberg, the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of the Free University of Berlin
Free University of Berlin
Freie Universität Berlin is one of the leading and most prestigious research universities in Germany and continental Europe. It distinguishes itself through its modern and international character. It is the largest of the four universities in Berlin. Research at the university is focused on the...
, the University of Grenoble
University of Grenoble
University of Grenoble or Grenoble University was a university in Grenoble, France until 1970, when it was split into several different institutions:...
and the Sorbonne
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...
.
Huggins studied the history of African-Americans as an integral part of the history of the United States. His research interests included the history of slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
, the experience of slavery and its impact on American society and culture. The center of his argument was that without a knowledge of the African-American experience one could not understand what is usually called American history, but rather what colleagues said could be a code for "white American history." With careful scholarship and empathy, his Black Odyssey tells the story of the self-creation of the African-American people. It traces the full impact of the Middle Passage
Middle Passage
The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of people from Africa were shipped to the New World, as part of the Atlantic slave trade...
and of North American slavery, both on the enslaved and on those who enslaved them. Likewise, his study of the Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...
is a lens to examine American society in the Jazz Age.
1920s
File:1920s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: Third Tipperary Brigade Flying Column No. 2 under Sean Hogan during the Irish Civil War; Prohibition agents destroying barrels of alcohol in accordance to the 18th amendment, which made alcoholic beverages illegal throughout the entire decade; In...
Huggins wrote an important biography of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing...
and edited the biographical series, Black Americans of Achievement. He was working on a major biography of the late Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
-winning diplomat Ralph Bunche
Ralph Bunche
Ralph Johnson Bunche or 1904December 9, 1971) was an American political scientist and diplomat who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s mediation in Palestine. He was the first person of color to be so honored in the history of the Prize...
and on a shorter book about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
when he died.
In 1981 Huggins established the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectureship in Afro-American Life, History and Culture. Harvard students praised Huggins for "exceptional clarity and entertaining lectures" in a course he and a colleague taught on changing concepts of race in the United States.
Works
- Protestants Against Poverty: Boston's Charities, 1870-1900. (ForewordForewordA foreword is a piece of writing sometimes placed at the beginning of a book or other piece of literature. Written by someone other than the primary author of the work, it often tells of some interaction between the writer of the foreword and the book's primary author or the story the book tells...
by Oscar Handlin) Westport, CT: Greenwood (1971) ISBN 0837133076 - Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971 ISBN 0-19-501665-3
- Key issues in the Afro-American experience. Edited by Nathan I. Huggins, Martin Kilson [and] Daniel M. Fox. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich [1971] 2 vols. ISBN 0155483714 (v.1) ISBN 0155483722 (v. 2)
- Voices From the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press (1976) ISBN 0195019555
- Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass. Boston: Little, Brown (1980) ISBN 0316380008
- Afro-American Studies: A Report to the Ford Foundation. New York: Ford Foundation (1985) ISBN 0916584259
- Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery. New York: Pantheon (1990) ISBN 0679728147
- W.E.B. Du Bois, Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, The Souls of Black Folk, Dusk of Dawn, essays, articles from The Crisis, ed. Nathan I. Huggins. Penguin USA (1986) ISBN 1883011310
- Revelations: American History, American Myths, ed. Brenda Smith Huggins. New York: Oxford University Press (1995) ISBN 0195082362