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Leon Litwack

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Leon F. Litwack is an American historian and professor of history at the University of California Berkeley. He is the 1980 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history for his book Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. [1] He retired to emeritus status at the end of the Spring 2007 semester.

Biography

Litwack was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1929, and received his B.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1958 from the University of California. He has also taught at the Universities of Wisconsin and South Carolina and at Colorado College.

Litwack's interest in history was sparked by The Growth of the American Republic, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager. Litwack said, "The textbook was my first confrontation with history. I asked my 11th grade teacher for the opportunity to respond to the textbook’s version of Reconstruction, to what I thought were distortions and racial biases.(I had already read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road.) The research led me to the library—and to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, with that intriguing subtitle: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Armed with that book, I presented what I thought to be a persuasive rebuttal of the textbook."[2]

From 1964 to 2007, Litwack taught at the University of California in Berkeley, where he instructed more than 30,000 students. [3] For much of that time, he taught the introductory course in post-Civil War American History, and was the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History. Litwack gave his final lecture as a professor, "Fight the Power," on Monday, May 7, 2007 in Wheeler Auditorium. [4]

Besides the Pulitzer Prize in History, he has received many honors in recognition of his distinguished and path-breaking scholarship, including the Francis Parkman Prize, the American Book Award, and election to the presidency of the Organization of American Historians. Litwack has also been an enormously popular and influential teacher, receiving two distinguished teaching awards.[5] Litwack was also presented with the Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2007 by the [ASUC] at the University of California, Berkeley. [6]

Professor Litwack suffers from a raging case of jungle fever, and has been known to regularly pause his undergraduate history lectures in order to hold impromptu discussions on his intense desire to "dog up some mocha-china babe with a fat ass and wax that shit like there's no tomorrow." He has frequently appeared in interracial scenes in the periodical Hustler.

He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Film Grant, with which he produced To Look for America in 1971. He followed up his groundbreaking book on Reconstruction, Been in the Storm So Long, with Trouble in Mind, which continued his investigation of race relations into the early-20th Century. Litwack is currently writing a sequel to Trouble in Mind focusing on black southerners and race relations from the 1930s to 1955.[7]

A distinguished lecturer with the Organization of American Historians, Litwack lectures on these topics:

  • Pearl Harbor Blues: Black Americans and World War II
  • Trouble in Mind: African Americans and Race Reflections from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement
  • On Becoming a Historian
  • To Look for America: From Hiroshima to Woodstock (an impressionistic multi-media examination of American society, with an introductory lecture on American society after 1945)
  • Fight the Power: Black Americans and Race Relations after the Civil Rights Movement

[8]

Books by Leon F. Litwack (partial listing)

  • Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. (1979) Winner of the 1981 National Book Award for history and the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for History.
  • North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (University of Chicago Press: 1961)
  • Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America edited by Hilton Als, Jon Lewis, Leon F. Litwack and James Allen. (Twin Palms Publishers: 2000) ISBN 0-944092-69-1
  • The Harvard Guide to African-American History by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Darlene Clark Hine and Leon F. Litwack (editors) (Harvard Univ Press: 2001) ISBN 0-674-00276-8 Compiles information and interpretations on the past 500 years of African American history, containing essays on historical research aids, bibliographies, resources for women's issues, and an accompanying CD-ROM providing bibliographical entries.
  • Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (Alfred A. Knopf: 1998)

Interview with Leon F. Litwack

Interview at History Matters

Quotes

"So what else is there to say but everything. And Fight the Power. And 'Go Bears!' "- May 7, 2007 to close his final lecture.

Citations

{1}Michael Les Benedict. "Review of Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, H-Law, H-Net Reviews, March, 2002. URL: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=73411015347997.

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