Stanley Elkins

Stanley M. Elkins (April 27, 1925 in Boston, Massachusetts - September 16, 2013 in Leeds, Massachusetts) was an American historian, best known for his controversial comparison of slavery in the United States to Nazi concentration camps, and for his collaborations (in a book and numerous articles) with Eric McKitrick regarding the early American Republic. He obtained his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and taught at the University of Chicago, spending most of his career as a professor of history at Smith College.

Elkins was born in Boston to Frank and Frances Elkins (née Reiner). He attended Boston English High School and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943, serving in the 36nd Infantry Regiment, fighting in Italy during World War II. After the war, he married Dorothy Adele Lamken and attended Harvard University on the GI Bill (A.B. 1949), followed by Columbia University for graduate school in American history (M.A. 1951, Ph.D. 1958), where he studied under Richard Hofstadter. He and fellow graduate student Eric McKitrick received a joint appointment as assistant professors of history at the University of Chicago, where they taught from 1955 to 1960. In 1960 he joined the faculty at Smith College, where he was appointed the Sydenham Clark Parsons Professor Emeritus of History from 1969 until his death in 2013.

Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), based on Elkins' doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, was theoretically innovative and enormously influential in the years after its publication, although its arguments are largely superseded today.

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