Winthrop Jordan

Winthrop Donaldson Jordan (November 11, 1931 – February 23, 2007) was an American history professor and renowned writer of American Civil War and racial history of the United States.

Jordan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was the son of Henry Donaldson Jordan, a professor of history at Clark University, and Lucretia Mott Churchill, great-great-granddaughter of the abolitionists James and Lucretia Mott.

He received his A.B. in social relations from Harvard University in 1953, his M.A. in history from Clark University in 1957, and his Ph.D. in history in 1960 from Brown University, which later recognized him as a distinguished alumnus. Jordan's teaching career began in 1955 as a history instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy. 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.

In 1982, Jordan relocated to the University of Mississippi, where he was the William F. Winter Professor of History and Professor of Afro-American Studies. 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."

Only a few years after his 2004 retirement, Jordan, a Quaker, died in his Oxford, Mississippi home at the age of seventy-five after suffering from Lou Gehrig’s Disease and liver cancer for several years. He was the father of three sons: Joshua, Mott, and Eliot. He was married to Cora; together they had ten grandchildren.

In 2005, some of Jordan's former students published a collection of essays entitled "Affect and Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race, and Religion in Appreciation of Winthrop D. Jordan". After his death in 2007, his students also established the Winthrop Jordan Memorial Research Fund "to further Professor Jordan’s legacy of teaching, scholarship, and philanthropy by supporting graduate student research in slavery, race, religion, and sexuality."

External links

* [http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/27579.html]
* [http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/35747.html]
* [http://www.washtimes.com/upi/20070308-062415-9576r]
* [http://www.umf.olemiss.edu/intermed/annual/home/jordanfund.php]
* [http://columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eguides/amerihis/bancroftlist.html] New York Times, March 8, 2007,p. 14, col.1