Winthrop Jordan

Who was Winthrop Jordan?

Winthrop Donaldson Jordan was a professor of history and renowned writer on the history of slavery and the origins of racism in the United States.

Jordan is best known for his book White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, published in 1968, which earned the National Book Award in History and Biography, the Bancroft Prize, and other honors. Jordan’s assertion in White Over Black that English perceptions about color, Christianity, manners, sexuality, and social hierarchy contributed to their "unthinking decision" to commence the trans-Atlantic slave trade and crystallized by the late eighteenth century into a race-based justification for chattel slavery, had a profound impact on historians’ understanding of both slavery and racism. The book’s erudite discussion of inter-racial sex is credited with inspiring serious scholarly inquiry into that topic—particularly into the relationship between president Thomas Jefferson and his slave named Sally Hemings.

In 1993, Jordan won a second Bancroft Prize for Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy. In this work, Jordan brought to light details of a previously unstudied slave revolt near Natchez, Mississippi.