15 Facts About Nathan Huggins

Nathan Irvin Huggins was a distinguished American historian, author and educator.

Nathan Huggins died of cancer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 62.

Nathan Huggins's father was Winston J Huggins, an African-American waiter and railroad worker, and his mother was Marie Warsaw, a Jewish woman.

When Nathan Huggins was 12 years old, his father left the family and his mother moved them to San Francisco, California.

Nathan Huggins attended high school and worked as a warehouseman, longshoreman, and porter.

Nathan Huggins later used the GI Bill of Rights to enter the University of California, Berkeley.

Nathan Huggins studied at Harvard University, where he received his AM in 1957 and Ph.

Nathan Huggins held assistant professorships at California State University, Long Beach, Lake Forest College, and the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Nathan Huggins served as visiting associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley before joining the faculty at Columbia University as a professor of history in 1970.

Ten years later, Huggins accepted positions as the first W E B Du Bois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies and Director of the Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.

Nathan Huggins taught outside the US at the University of Heidelberg, the John F Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of the Free University of Berlin, the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne.

Nathan Huggins studied the history of African Americans as an integral part of the history of the United States.

Nathan Huggins wrote an important biography of Frederick Douglass and edited the biographical series Black Americans of Achievement.

Nathan Huggins was working on a major biography of the late Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Ralph Bunche and on a shorter book about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States when he died.

In 1981, Huggins established the W E B Du Bois Lectureship in Afro-American Life, History and Culture.