Alrutheus Ambush Taylor (1893–1954) was a historian from Washington D.C. He was a specialist in the history of blacks and segregation, especially during the Reconstruction Era.[1] The Crisis cited him as a "painstaking scholar and authority on Negro history".[2] An African-American, he taught at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama, at the West Virginia Collegiate Institute in West Virginia, and at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Following a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, Taylor began researching the role of African Americans in the South during Reconstruction.[3] He authored The Negro in South Carolina During the Reconstruction in 1924, The Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia in 1926, and The Negro in Tennessee, 1865-1880 in 1941.[4]
Alrutheus Ambush Taylor | |
---|---|
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Born | November 22, 1893 |
Died | June 4, 1954 | (aged 60)
Spouses | Harriet Ethel Wilson
(m. 1919; died 1941)Catherine Brummell Buchanan Taylor
(m. 1943) |
Academic background | |
Education | University of Michigan (BA) Harvard University (MA, PhD) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | American History |
Sub-discipline | Reconstruction history |
He died at Hubbard Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 4, 1954, at the age of 60.[5][6]
Early life and education
editTaylor was born in Washington, D.C., the youngest of Lewis and Lucy Johnson Taylor's nine children.[7] He enrolled in the University of Michigan in 1910 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics in 1916. Taylor was later rejected from the university's history graduate program by Ulrich B. Phillips, who cited Taylor's undergraduate focus in mathematics.[1] Carter G. Woodson financed Taylor's Master of Arts at Harvard University, where he completed his thesis entitled "The Social Conditions and Treatment of Negroes in South Carolina, 1865-1880" in 1923.[7] Taylor would finish his PhD at Harvard in 1935.[5]
His earliest two published books, The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction in 1924, and The Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia, challenged the Dunning School of Reconstruction historiography.[5]
Publications
editReferences
edit- ^ a b Woods, James Pleasant (1969). Alrutheus Ambush Taylor, 1893-1954: segregated historian of Reconstruction. Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. Retrieved 28 August 2012.
- ^ Clifton H. Johnson (November 1971). "Cardoso". The Crisis: 304. ISSN 0011-1422. Retrieved 28 August 2012.
- ^ James W. Ivy (July 1941). "Reconstruction in Tennessee". The Crisis: 235. ISSN 0011-1422. Retrieved 28 August 2012.
- ^ "Taylor, Alrutheus Ambush (1893-1955)". Blackpast.org. 12 February 2007. Retrieved 28 August 2012.
- ^ a b c Franklin, John Hope (1954). "Alrutheus Ambush Taylor". The Journal of Negro History. 39 (3): 240–242. doi:10.1086/JNHv39n3p240. ISSN 0022-2992. JSTOR 2715852. S2CID 149779976.
- ^ Mattie McHollin, Lula Brooks, Katherine Harrell, Susie Harris, Jason Harrison, and Vanessa Smith (2009). ""A Guide to the A. A. Taylor Collection, 1923-1954"". Prepared for the Fisk University Archives, Fisk University. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
- ^ a b Hall, Gilroy; B, Stephen (1996). "Research as Opportunity: Alrutheus Ambush Taylor, Black Intellectualism, and the Remaking of Reconstruction Historiography, 1893-1954". UCLA Historical Journal. 16.