Rate My Professor Leon Litwack

Litwack's scholarship profoundly shaped the fields of African American history, Southern history, and American social history, emphasizing "history from the bottom up" and the human consequences of events like slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation. His major publications include North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 1961); Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (Knopf, 1979), which garnered the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Francis Parkman Prize; Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (Knopf, 1998); and How Free is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow (Harvard University Press, 2009). He also co-edited Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 1988), collaborated on Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000), and served as general editor of The Harvard Guide to African-American History (2001). Among his honors were a 1967 Guggenheim Fellowship, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and presidencies of the Organization of American Historians and Southern Historical Association. Litwack's influence extended through mentoring generations of scholars and his commitment to public history, including film projects like To Look for America (1971).