Barbara J. Fields
Barbara J. Fields is a professor of history at Columbia University , specializing
in the history of the American South. She was visiting editor at the Freedmen
and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland , College Park,
1981/82. She is the author of Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground:
Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press, 1985),
which won the John H. Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association.
She co-authored, with members of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project,
The Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 1985), which
won the Founders Prize of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society and
the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for the History of the Federal
Government and Slaves No More: There Essays on Emancipation and the
Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1992). In 1994 the Lincoln and
Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College awarded the Lincoln Prize to Free
At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Civil
War (The New Press, 1992), also a publication of the Freedmen and Southern
Society Project, which she co-edited. Among her other awards and fellowships
are a Michael Clark Rockefeller Fellowship at Harvard University, the George
Washington Egleston Prize at Yale University, and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.
From 1992-97 she was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellow. She was
a featured commentator in Ken Burns' acclaimed PBS documentary “The Civil
War.” Dr. Fields delivered the annual W.E.B. Du Bois lecture series at
Harvard University in 1995 and she has lectured widely in the United States
, as well as in Canada , Paraguay , Brazil , Australia , and Japan . She
is currently at work on a book entitled “Humane Letters: Writing in English
About Human Affairs.”
Dr. Fields was born in Charleston , South Carolina , and raised in Washington
, D.C. , where she attended Morgan Elementary School , Banneker Junior
High School , and Western High School . She earned her bachelor's degree
from Harvard University , and her M. Phil, and Ph.D. from Yale University
, where she studied under C. Vann Woodward. Before joining the faculty
at Columbia she taught at the University of Michigan . During the fall
of 1988 she was visiting Ford Professor of Southern Studies at the University
of Mississippi .
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