Recent Department News

In Memoriam, Kenneth M. Stampp

Kenneth M. Stampp taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1946 until his retirement in 1983. He was the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History. Born in Milwaukee in 1912, Stampp received his higher education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he completed his doctoral studies in 1942. Before appointment at Berkeley, he taught at the Universities of Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Maryland. Stampp held the presidency of the Organization of American Historians (1977-78) and was elected to both the American Antiquarian Society (1972) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975). He received the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction (1989) and the Lincoln Prize for Lifetime Contributions in Civil War Studies from Gettysburg College (1993). Among his many other distinctions were appointments to the Fulbright Lectureship at the University of Munich, the Harmsworth Professorship at the University of Oxford, and the Commonwealth Lectureship at the University of London. Stampp also taught as a visiting professor at Harvard University, SUNY Binghamton, Colgate University, and Williams College. He was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

A specialist in Civil War and Reconstruction history, Stampp is the author of The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956); And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860-1861 (1950); The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (1980); America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (1990); and The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1965). With Leon F. Litwack he edited Reconstruction: An Anthology of Revisionist Writings (1969). He is a co-author with John M. Blum and others of The National Experience: A History of the United States (1963, revised editions, 1968, 1973). His articles appear in the American Historical Review, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of Southern History, Journal of Negro History, North Carolina Historical Review, and Commentary.

An MP3 of Professor Stampp's 1983 Moses lecture, My Life with Lincoln , can be found here.