Sent: Saturday, July 11, 2009 11:44 AM

Kenneth Stampp died early yesterday morning, two weeks shy of his 97th
birthday.

Stampp was the author of several major books, most importantly "The
Peculiar Insitution:  Slavery in the Antebellum South," an unblinking
account of southern slave society that was among the first to take slave
resistance seriously.  He also wrote what remains the single best study
of the secession crisis, "And the War Came," a major revisionist account
of Reconstruction, and numerous important essays.  A forceful stylist
and vigorously argumentative, Stampp was as formidable on the page as he
was in the classroom.

Stampp spent most of his teaching career at Berkeley, where he trained a
large cohort of graduate students who went on to write important books
of their on the history of race, slavery, and the civil war era.  They
included, among many others, Leon Litwack, William Freehling, Joel
Williamson, Robert Starobin, Robert Abzug, William Gienapp, and Reid
Mitchell.

He was also instrumental in assembling at Berkeley an astonishing groups
of historians in the field--Litwack, Larry Levine, Charlies Sellers, and
Winthrop Jordan--an abundance of intellectual riches for me to revel in
as as graduate student there in the 1970s.

Until the very end remained sharp, he kept up with the field, vigorous
in mind even as his body grew frail.  He held all of his students to the
highest standards.  It was his greatest gift to me, and I will always
revere him for it.

Jim Oakes

Humanities & Social
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