Philip Curtin: Longtime Johns Hopkins University professor reshaped the history of the African slave trade (Obit.)
Philip D. Curtin, a retired Johns Hopkins University professor and a historian of the African slave trade who was instrumental in changing the way schools teach the subject, died June 4 at Chester County Hospital in West Chester, Pa., of pneumonia. He was 87 and lived in Kennett Square, Pa.
Dr. Curtin, winner of a 1983 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was a leading figure in reviving the neglected field of African history after World War II.
He applied more rigorous and scholarly methods to the study of the slave trade and brought the topic to the attention of a wider academic audience. He and a colleague started the department of African languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin, which the American Historical Association said was the first in the United States.
He published more than a dozen books and "made himself a name as a brilliant historian who broke away from the dominant Eurocentric models of historiography of other continents to create a critical and pioneering body of scholarship on Africa, the Atlantic world, the British empire, and comparative history," Pillarisetti Sudhir said in an AHA blog post....
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Dr. Curtin, winner of a 1983 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was a leading figure in reviving the neglected field of African history after World War II.
He applied more rigorous and scholarly methods to the study of the slave trade and brought the topic to the attention of a wider academic audience. He and a colleague started the department of African languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin, which the American Historical Association said was the first in the United States.
He published more than a dozen books and "made himself a name as a brilliant historian who broke away from the dominant Eurocentric models of historiography of other continents to create a critical and pioneering body of scholarship on Africa, the Atlantic world, the British empire, and comparative history," Pillarisetti Sudhir said in an AHA blog post....
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