Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie (born 1960) is a British historian and professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C.[1] Born in London, Kerr-Ritchie was educated at Kingston University in England, and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, United States.
His first book, Freedpeople in the Tobacco South, Virginia 1860-1900, expands the traditional periodization of US Reconstruction to argue for the making of a black peasantry as a consequence of transformations in the global tobacco economy.
[citation needed] His second, Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World, examines commemorations of British colonial abolition and how these served as sites of anti-US slavery mobilization in the English-speaking Atlantic between the 1830s and 1860s.
[citation needed] The third, Freedom’s Seekers: Essays on Comparative Emancipation, offers a broad transnational focus of experiences and lives challenging nation-centered histories that usually end up reifying exceptional narratives of emancipation.
[citation needed] The fourth book, Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade, provides the first scholarly examination of the US maritime slave trade and a successful slave ship revolt in 1841 with international ramifications.