Assistant Professor of History
Office: 200 Carson Hall
Office Phone: (603) 646-9351
Fax: (603) 646-3353
Email: Russell.Rickford@Dartmouth.edu
Russell Rickford specializes in the black radical tradition and black political culture after WWII. His interests include American labor history and the history of education. He teaches courses in American social and political history and the history of 20th century social movements, with a particular emphasis on radical internationalism. He is committed to exposing students to the value of class and political economy as analytic categories. He is dedicated to convincing young people that they must think for themselves (as Malcolm X argued) and rigorously investigate political ideologies, especially their own. He is currently working on an intellectual history of Pan-Africanist private schools during the era of Black Power. The study is tentatively titled "A Struggle in the Arena of Ideas: Black independent Schools and the Quest for Nationhood, 1966-1980." He is also the editor of a forthcoming collection of the writings of historian Manning Marable. A native of Guyana, Rickford completed his doctorate at Columbia University in 2009. He holds a Master's in African-American Studies from Columbia and a Bachelor's from Howard University. He is the author of Betty Shabazz: Surviving Malcolm X, the only major biography of Malcolm's late widow. He is the co-author, along with his father, Stanford University linguist John Rickford, of Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English.
