Peter Robert Kolchin (born June 3, 1943) is an American historian. He has specialized in slavery and labor in the American South before and after the Civil War, and in comparisons with Russian serfdom and other forms of labor. He won the Bancroft Prize in American History and the Avery O. Craven Award for his book Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987).

Life

Born in New York, Peter Kolchin attended local schools. He graduated from Columbia University with an A.B. in 1964, and conducted graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1970. His doctoral thesis was entitled First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction. He is a professor at the University of Delaware.

Awards

Works