Sydney Nathans

Sydney Harold Nathans (born May 24, 1940) is an American historian. He is a Professor Emeritus at Duke University and has written several history books including To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker and A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland.

Sydney Nathans
Born (1940-05-24) May 24, 1940
Academic background
EducationPhD, 1969, Johns Hopkins University
ThesisDaniel Webster and the Whig party 1828-1844. (1969)
Academic work
InstitutionsDuke University

Early life and education

Nathans was born on May 24, 1940.[1] By the age of eight, his family (consisting of his merchant father, mother, and sister), had lived in five different states.[2] He was educated at San Jacinto High School in Texas, where he won the 1958 National High School Oratorical Contest.[3]

Career

Upon earning his PhD, Nathans accepted a faculty appointment in Duke University's history department.[2] He published his first book in 1973 titled Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy through the Johns Hopkins University Press. The book focused on the establishment of the political party Whig and one of its founders, Daniel Webster.[4] In 1978, Nathans travelled across Alabama to see if he could locate descendants of enslaved African Americans in order to gain a better understanding of the Great Migration.[2] There, he encountered Alice Hargress, whose story he based his book on titled A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland. Hargress described the migration of 114 black slaves from North Carolina to a 1600-acre plantation in Alabama where they eventually purchased their freedom.[5][6] He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980 to assist in his research.[7]

In 1984, Nathans edited the University of North Carolina Press and NC Division of Archives and History five-volume series The Way We Lived in North Carolina, which received the American Historical Association's James Harvey Robinson Prize.[8] A few years later, he continued his research into the history of black migration in America by following the story of Mary Walker in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Nathan came into contact with Walker's descendants and wrote her story of escaping slavery in his 2012 book To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker.[9][10] It would go on to receive the 2013 Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History as "the best book written in English on slavery or abolition."[11]

Selected publications
  • Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy (1973)
  • The Quest for Progress: The Way We Lived in North Carolina, 1870-1920 (1983)
  • To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (2012)
  • A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland (2017)

References
  1. "Nathans, Sydney". id.loc.gov. Retrieved August 29, 2020.
  2. Nathans, Sydney (February 8, 2018). "THE BLACK-OWNED ALABAMA PLANTATION THAT TAUGHT ME THE VALUE OF HOME". zocalopublicsquare.org. Retrieved August 29, 2020.
  3. "WINS SPEECH CONTEST". Victoria, Texas: Victoria Advocate. April 20, 1958. Retrieved August 29, 2020 – via Newspapers.com.
  4. Current, Richard N. (December 1973). "Review of Sydney Nathans. Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy and Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism". The American Historical Review. 78 (5): 1530–1531. doi:10.1086/ahr/78.5.1530. Retrieved September 9, 2020.
  5. Arenson, Adam (2019). "Review of A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland". Journal of Social History. 52 (3): 951–953. doi:10.1093/jsh/shx079. Retrieved September 9, 2020.
  6. Romine Powell, Dannye (February 21, 2017). "The story of former N.C. slaves who bought land they'd worked in bondage". The Charlotte Observer. Retrieved September 2, 2020.
  7. "SYDNEY NATHANS". gf.org. Retrieved September 9, 2020.
  8. Munger, Guy (December 30, 1984). "Literary notes from all over". The News and Observer. Retrieved September 2, 2020 – via newspapers.com.
  9. VanderVelde, Lee (March 2013). "To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker by Sydney Nathans (review)". The Journal of the Civil War Era. The University of North Carolina Press. 3 (1): 129–131. doi:10.1353/cwe.2013.0009. Retrieved September 9, 2020.
  10. Bae, Lena S. (February 29, 2012). "Mary Walker's Family Story". thecrimson.com. Retrieved September 9, 2020.
  11. "Nathans Wins Frederick Douglass Book Prize". history.duke.edu. February 28, 2014. Retrieved September 9, 2020.
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