The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization’s (AHI) Charter Fellow Robert Paquette was recently praised by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) for his work in the creation of the institute. In his article “Springfield Purges Men in Literature,” NAS author Peter Woord discusses the occurrences on college campuses around the country to “marginalize, discredit, and silence the views of faculty members who dissent” from the from the current campus orthodoxies” and how many college professors have quit or been forced to leave for non-conformity. Wood discusses the few that remain like Professor Paquette calling them “rare exceptions of men willing to bear all the opprobrium heaped on those who refuse to conform to the ideological fashions on campus.”
AHI Charter Fellow Robert Paquette
Professor Robert Paquette received his B. A. cum laude in 1973 from Bowling Green State University; he received his Ph. D. with honors in 1982 from the University of Rochester. He has published dozens of books and articles on the history of slavery. His Sugar Is Made with Blood (Wesleyan University Press, 1988) won the Elsa Goveia Prize, given every three years by the Association of Caribbean Historians for the best book in Caribbean history. More recently, his essay “Of Facts and Fables: New Light on the Denmark Vesey Affair” (co-authored with Douglas Egerton) won the Malcolm C. Clark Award, given by the South Carolina Historical Society. He has co-edited (with Stanley Engerman) The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (University Press of Florida, 1996); (with Louis A. Ferleger) Slavery, Secession, and Southern History(University Press of Virginia, 2000); (with Stanley Engerman and Seymour Drescher) Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2001); (with Mark M. Smith) The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2010); with Rebecca J. Fox, “Unbought Grace”: An Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Reader” (University of South Carolina Press, 2011); He is currently working on A Grand Carnage (Yale University Press), a study of the largest slave insurrection in United States history and, with Douglas Egerton, Court of Death: A Documentary History of the Denmark VeseyAffair (University Press of Florida). In 2005, the University of Rochester invited him to return to his alma mater to receive the Mary Young Award for distinguished achievement. A recipient of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Historical Association, the National Endowment of the Humanities,as well as for the AHI from VERITAS, Thomas W. Smith Foundation, Watson-Brown Foundation, Armstrong Foundation, Apgar Foundation, Jack Miller Center, and Charles G. Koch Foundation. In 2007, Paquette co-founded the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. In 2006-2008, he served on the Scholars Council of the Jack Miller Center. In 2008 he was appointed to the advisory board of the Cobb Forum on Southern Jurisprudence and Intellectual Thought of the Watson-Brown Foundation. That same year President George W. Bush forwarded Paquette’s nomination to the Senate for a seat on the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2012, the American Freedom Alliance awarded him the Heroes of Conscience Award. He has taught at Hamilton College for thirty years. He held the Publius Virgilius Rogers Chair in American History for seventeen years until January 2011, when he resigned the title in protest. In 2013 The United States Commission on Civil Rights appointed him to the New York State Advisory Committee. In 2014, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the American Conservative Union Foundation awarded him the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Prize for Academic Freedom.
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