Peter Kolchin, a distinguished historian of American slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and comparative slavery and a University of Delaware professor for over 30 years, died at home on Monday, January 13, 2025. He was 81. The cause of death was lymphoma.
Peter’s scholarly influence was manifested through numerous publications, lectures, public talks, teacher workshops, and books. He lectured widely, including talks and lectureships in France, England, Ireland, Russia, Brazil, Germany, and Canada, as well as the United States. His five books reflected the breadth of his interests and impact: First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama’s Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction (1972); Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987); American Slavery, 1619-1867 (1993); A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective (2003); and most recently, Emancipation: The Abolition and Aftermath of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (2024).
In turn, he received awards and laurels for his accomplishments, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, a Bancroft Prize from Columbia University (for Unfree Labor), an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America (for American Slavery), a residency at the Charles Warren Center of Harvard University, and election to the Society of American Historians. In 2002, the University of Delaware awarded him its highest faculty honor, the Alison Professorship, recognizing outstanding scholarship, teaching, and service.
During his long career, Peter taught at the University of California at Davis, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of New Mexico, and Harvard University, before coming to the University of Delaware in 1985. He retired in 2016 as Henry Clay Reed Professor of History. He thoroughly enjoyed teaching and took great pleasure in presenting workshops to Delaware teachers. Training the next generation of historians was particularly rewarding; he supervised over a dozen University of Delaware graduate students as they researched, wrote, and completed their doctoral dissertations. They remember him as a brilliant, generous, kind, and supportive mentor whose tireless devotion moved them to do their best work. In 2015, several of his former students honored him with a volume, New Directions in Slavery Studies, edited by Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press). “Few practicing historians of slavery today,” they noted, “have escaped the influence of Kolchin’s work.”
A spirit of service animated Peter’s professional life. He gave his time to numerous departmental, college, and university committees as well as to professional historical organizations, including the Organization of American Historians (editorial board and executive committee) and book and article awards committees. His most sustained commitment was to the Southern Historical Association, which he served in many capacities, and to which he was elected president in 2013-14.
Peter Robert Kolchin was born in Washington, D.C., on June 3, 1943, while his father was serving in the U.S. Navy. He grew up on the Upper West Side of New York City, attending The Walden School and Columbia University, where he majored in history. In 1970, he received the PhD in American History from Johns Hopkins University, where he was a student of David Herbert Donald.
Peter’s love of travel was likely sparked by a year in France when he was eleven years old, and a VW bus tour taken through the Soviet Union with his parents and sister a few years later. It became a lifelong passion and avocation. He was an avid fan of the New York Yankees from the days of Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra to the new world of big money contracts, the designated hitter, the extra-innings second-base rule, and the pitch clock. Of those changes, he approved of only the pitch clock. He played the guitar and had a beautiful singing voice, which in his younger years he used in service of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas and 1950s pop songs; could beat dealers at blackjack; played tennis and ran; and in his later years became a serious wine connoisseur. He was proud to have attended the 1963 March on Washington and to have suspended his graduate career in order to campaign for Eugene McCarthy in 1967-68 (a move that cost him his graduate school fellowship for a time).
He was preceded in death by his parents, Ellis Robert Kolchin and Kate Weil Kolchin, and by his infant twin sister, Carroll.
He is survived by his wife of 49 years, Anne M. Boylan, and their sons and daughters-in-law: Michael Boylan-Kolchin and Ann Fornof of Austin, Texas; David Boylan-Kolchin and Sara Handy of Washington, D.C.; and by their grandchildren, Marie and Josephine Boylan, and John and Kate Fornof. Also surviving are his sister, Elly Hardy and her husband, Andrew Hardy of Ottawa, Kansas.
The family would like to express their grateful thanks to the staff of Medical Oncology Hematology Consultants, particularly Dr. Jamal Misleh and Dr. Lydia Clements, as well as the Advanced Practice Providers and Certified Oncology Nurses who attended him during his illness. We particularly appreciated the care and comfort provided to Peter by aides from Bayada Home Health Care and, at the end, the services of Delaware Hospice.
In keeping with his wishes, there will be no funeral. A memorial service will be held at a later date.
To honor his memory, please consider a donation to Doctors without Borders or Amnesty International.