Papers of Nathan I. Huggins, 1927-1990

Nathan Irvin Huggins (1927-1989), American historian, was W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of History and of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University as well as director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research.

Huggins was born in Chicago in 1927 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1989. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving his A.B. degree in 1954 and M.A. in 1955, and advanced his studies at Harvard University where he received his A.M. in 1957 and Ph.D. in history in 1962.

Huggins' professional career in academia spanned nearly 30 years, beginning with assistant professorships at California State College (Long Beach), Lake Forest College (Illinois), and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He served as visiting associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley before joining the faculty at Columbia University as a professor of history in 1970. Ten years later, Huggins accepted positions as W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies and Director of the Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. He also taught outside the U.S. at institutions including the University of Heidelberg, the Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin, the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne.

Huggins was strongly committed to analyzing the history of African-Americans as an integral part of the history of the United States. The center of his argument was always that without an understanding of African-American history, one could not understand what is usually called American history, but rather what colleagues said could be a code for "white American history."

At the time of his death, Huggins was working on a major biography of the late Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Ralph Bunche and on a shorter book about the civil rights movement. His book Harlem Renaissance, published in 1971, was nominated for a National Book Award. His other writings include Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery (1977) and Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (1980).

Among Huggins' proudest achievements at Harvard was the establishment in 1981 of the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectureship in Afro-American Life, History and Culture. Harvard students praised Huggins for "exceptional clarity and entertaining lectures" in a course he and a colleague taught on changing concepts of race in the United States.