James Oakes (born December 19, 1953) is an American

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the stu ...

, and is a Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he teaches history courses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Slavery, the Old South, Abolitionism and U.S. and World History. He taught previously at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nin ...

and

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Chart ...

.James Oakes
. Graduate Center. City University of New York. gc.cuny.edu. Retrieved 2017-10-09.

Career

Oakes' book ''The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics'' (2007) was a co-winner of the 2008

Lincoln Prize The Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, founded by the late Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman in partnership with Gabor Boritt, Director Emeritus of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, is administered by the Gilder Lehrman Institute for Ameri ...

.Press Release: Graduate Center Historian James Oakes Wins 2008 Lincoln Prize for the Radical and the Republican
. ''News''. Graduate Center. City University of New York. February 1, 2008. Retrieved 2017-10-09. The prize jury highlighted the book's use of a new comparative framework for understanding the careers of Lincoln and Douglass, and their respective views of race. It also noted that Oakes had succeeded in writing a scholarly work that was accessible to the general public. His more recent work focuses on emancipation and how it was implemented throughout the Southern states. In 2013 Oakes published ''Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865'', which garnered him a second Lincoln Prize (2013).

David Brion Davis David Brion Davis (February 16, 1927 – April 14, 2019) was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, ...

, writing in ''

The New York Review of Books ''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of i ...

'', identified the basic theme of ''Freedom National'' as the view that Lincoln's Republican Party had been an antislavery party both before and during the war, one that viewed defining humans as chattel as both a violation of the "freedom principle" embodied in natural and international law and a violation of the

US Constitution The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It superseded the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, in 1789. Originally comprising seven articles, it delineates the nationa ...

, which defined slaves as "persons held in service". In ''Freedom National'' (p. xxiii), Oakes wrote, "Like most historians I always believed that the purpose of the war shifted 'from Union to emancipation.'" But, in fact, although "Republicans did not believe that the Constitution allowed them to wage a war for any 'purpose' other than the restoration of the Union, ... from the very beginning they insisted that slavery was the cause of the rebellion and emancipation an appropriate and ultimately indispensable means of suppressing it."

Eric Foner Eric Foner (; born February 7, 1943) is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African-American biography, the American Civil War, Reconstru ...

called the work "the best account ever written of the complex historical process known as emancipation". (Davis, in a review of ''Freedom National'', quoting Foner) Oakes also wrote the

foreword A foreword is a (usually short) piece of writing, sometimes placed at the beginning of a book or other piece of literature. Typically written by someone other than the primary author of the work, it often tells of some interaction between the ...

Randy Barnett Randy Evan Barnett (born February 5, 1952) is an American legal scholar. He serves as the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts, and is the director of the Geor ...

and Evan Bernick's ''The Original Meaning of the 14th Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit'' (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021).

Works

* ''The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders'', Knopf, 1982. * "Slavery as an American Problem", in * *
Review
*
Review
* ''The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War'', W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. * "When Everybody Knew", in Blight, David W.; Downs, Jim, eds. (2017). ''Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation''. The University of Georgia Press. pp. 104-117. * ''The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution'', W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

References

External links

Tavis Smiley interview with James Oakes
April 6, 2007. pbs.org. Archived from th

on January 27, 2011

{{DEFAULTSORT:Oakes, James Living people City University of New York faculty Graduate Center, CUNY faculty Baruch College alumni UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni Lincoln Prize winners 1953 births Historians of Abraham Lincoln People from the Bronx Historians from New York (state)