Thomas Holt

Thomas Holt, currently the James Westfall Thompson Professor Emeritus of American and African American History at the University of Chicago, has written extensively about the experiences of people in the African diaspora, especially those in the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. His study of Jamaica’s economy, politics, and society after slavery, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Johns Hopkins, 1992) was awarded the 1995 Elsa Goveia Prize by the Association of Caribbean Historians and his earlier study of emancipation in the American South, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Illinois, 1977) received the Southern Historical Association’s Charles S. Sydnor Prize in 1978. His most recent works are The Problem of Race in the 21 st Century (Harvard 2000), Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (Hill & Wang, 2010), and The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights, which is scheduled for release by Oxford later this month.