Peter Kolchin

Peter Robert Kolchin[1] (June 3, 1943 – January 13, 2025) was an American historian.

Kolchin won the Bancroft Prize in American History and the Avery O. Craven Award for his book Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987).

Born in Washington, D.C., Kolchin attended local schools.

in 1964,[2] and conducted graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1970.

His doctoral thesis was entitled First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction.