HARRY C. BLACK had been chairman of the board of the A. S. Abell Company, which published the Baltimore Sunpapers, for more than 25 years when he died in 1956. The A. S. ABELL TRUST, created by his estate, endowed this professorship in his memory. Milton S. Eisenhower, then president of Hopkins, commented that the professorship “memorializes a great citizen of this city and the nation.” The Black family had a long history of philanthropy at Johns Hopkins, beginning in 1922 when the estate of H. Crawford Black, Harry Black’s father, created a fund to underwrite medical care for employees of his mining company.
Harry C. Black Chair in History
Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
Established in 1963 by the A. S. Abell Trust in memory of Harry C. Black
Held by Philip D. Morgan
PHILIP D. MORGAN, the Harry C. Black Professor of History, is an authority on early American history with particular interest in African-American history and the study of the Atlantic world. He was an Andrew Mellon Teaching Scholar at The Johns Hopkins University from 1978 to 1981 and joined the faculty in 2000. Dr. Morgan is a prolific author; his 1998 book, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, won the Barzun Prize of the American Philosophical Society and the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University. Dr. Morgan’s most recent book is entitled Black Experience and the Empire. His current research focuses on the colonization of Jamaica. He is a member of the Society of American Historians, the American Antiquarian Society and the Royal Historical Society.