James Oakes (historian)

James Oakes (born December 19, 1953) is an American historian, and is a Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he teaches history courses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Slavery, the Old South, Abolitionism and U.S. and World History. He taught previously at Princeton University and Northwestern University.^[1]

Early life and education[]

Oakes attended Catholic schools in New York City, before enrolling at Baruch College, CUNY, where he earned a B.A. in history in 1974.

Oakes earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, under the late Kenneth Stampp, author of The Peculiar Institution among other notable titles.

Career[]

Oakes' book The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (2007) was a co-winner of the 2008 Lincoln Prize.^[2] The prize jury highlighted the book's use of a new comparative framework for understanding the careers of Lincoln and Douglass, and their respective views of race. It also noted that Oakes had succeeded in writing a scholarly work that was accessible to the general public.^[2]

His more recent work focuses on emancipation and how it was implemented throughout the Southern states. In 2013 Oakes published Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865, which garnered him a second Lincoln Prize (2013).^[3] David Brion Davis, writing in The New York Review of Books, identified the basic theme of Freedom National as the view that Lincoln's Republican Party had been an antislavery party both before and during the war, one that viewed defining humans as chattel as both a violation of the "freedom principle" embodied in natural and international law and a violation of the US Constitution, which defined slaves as "persons held in service". Eric Foner called the work "the best account ever written of the complex historical process known as emancipation".^[4]

Oakes has also written and published many articles, encyclopedia entries, and op-eds.^[1]

Family[]

Oakes currently lives in Manhattan with his wife, Deborah Bohr, a health research administrator, and their son, Daniel.

Works[]

• The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders, Knopf, 1982. ISBN 0393317056
• ″Slavery as an American Problem,″ in Larry J. Griffin; Don Harrison Doyle, eds. (1995). The South as an American Problem. University of Georgia Press. p. 83. ISBN 978-0-8203-1752-6.
• Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South. W. W. Norton & Company. 1998. ISBN 978-0-393-31766-4.
• The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. W. W. Norton & Company. 2007. ISBN 978-0-393-33065-6.
• Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. W. W. Norton & Company. 2013. ISBN 9780393065312.
• The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014. ISBN 978-0-393-23993-5
• The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, W.W. Norton & Company, 2021. ISBN 9781324005858

References[]

External links[]

• Tavis Smiley interview with James Oakes. April 6, 2007. pbs.org. Archived from the original on January 27, 2011
• Tom Mackaman interview with James Oakes on World Socialist Web Sitehttps://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/18/oake-n18.html, 18 November 2019. Retrieved 10 December 2019. [1]