[2][3] He served at the University of Virginia from 1972 to 2014 as T. Cary Johnson Jr. professor of history, and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His most important book was Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830 , which won the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association in 1989.
[8][9] In an article shortly before his death, he described his scholarship as stemming froma commitment to bringing Africans respectfully into the mainstream of the history they share with the rest of us, and us with them.
Over the years, that’s extended to an effort to understand the experiences of enslavement on global scales – again, painting the larger picture, into which fit the Africans brought to the Americas.
[11][12] He is sometimes confused with the Joe C. Miller who wrote Never A Fight of Woman Against Man: What Textbooks Don't Say about Women's Suffrage, (published in The History Teacher, Vol.