Peter Kolchin, professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware, is the author of First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction (1972); Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987); American Slavery, 1619-1877 (1993); and A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective (2003). Winner of the Bancroft Prize, the OAH Avery O. Craven Award, and the Southern Historical Association's Charles Sydnor Award, he is currently completing a comparative study of emancipation and its aftermath in Russia and the American South, a sequel to Unfree Labor. In 2014, he served as the president of the Southern Historical Association.
In this talk, Kolchin offers a broad overview of two major versions of emancipation from bondage, both of which occurred in the 1860s: the freeing of serfs in Russia and of slaves in the southern United States.
