2008 LCP Annual Dinner: Dr. Richard J. Blackett

(May 5, 2008)

Audio Download (MP3) 

Richard J. Blackett is a historian of the abolitionist movement in the U.S. and particularly its transatlantic connections and the roles African Americans played in it. He is the author of Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860 (1983); Beating Against the Barriers: Biographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro-American History (1986); Thomas Morris Chester: Black Civil War Correspondent (1989); and Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (2001).

At present he is working on a study of the ways communities on both sides of the divide organized to support or resist enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the ways that slaves, by escaping, influenced the politics of slavery. Blackett has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Indiana University, and the University of Houston, where he was the John & Rebecca Moores Professor of History and African American Studies. He has been Associate Editor of the Journal of American History and is also past president of the Association of Caribbean Historians.