Thomas Cleveland Holt (born November 30, 1942) is an American historian, who is theJames Westfall Thompson Professor of American and African American History at theUniversity of Chicago. He has produced a number of works on the people and descendants of theAfrican Diaspora. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1994.^[1][2]

He taught atHoward University,Harvard University, theUniversity of California, Berkeley, and theUniversity of Michigan.^[3] He was born inDanville, Virginia.^[4]He was elected a Member of theAmerican Philosophical Society in 2016.^[5]

In 1978 Holt was awarded theSouthern Historical Association's Charles S. Sydnor Prize for his first book,Black Over White.^[6]

A past president of theAmerican Historical Association, Holt was a Fellow of theJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and theWoodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars from 1987 to 1988. Holt became aJohn D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1990.^[7]

In 1994, PresidentBill Clinton named Holt to the National Council on Humanities.^[8]

He was elected a fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.^[9]

He was a Citigroup Fellow at theAmerican Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall 2008.^[10]

• The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Johns Hopkins University Press), 1992, winner of theElsa Goveia Prize awarded by the Association of Caribbean Historians.
• Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (University of Illinois Press).
• "Nathan I. Huggins Lectures",The Problem of Race in the 21st Century (Harvard University Press), 2000
• With Frederick Cooper and Rebecca Jarvis Scott,Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, UNC Press, 2000,ISBN 978-0-8078-4854-8.
• Children of Fire: a History of African Americans (Hill & Wang), 2010
• The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights (Oxford University Press), 2021,ISBN 0197525822.

• Faculty Profile on the University of Chicago's website.
• Presidential Address at the American Historical Association.
• Guy Emerson Mount,"When Scholars Cry: Celebrating The Career Of Thomas C. Holt", AAIHS.
• Appearances onC-SPAN

• 21st-century African-American academics
• 21st-century American academics
• Black studies scholars
• 21st-century American historians
• 21st-century American male writers
• University of Chicago faculty
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• Howard University faculty
• Harvard University faculty
• Presidents of the American Historical Association
• University of California, Berkeley faculty
• University of Michigan faculty
• Living people
• 1942 births
• Members of the American Philosophical Society
• Historians from California
• American male non-fiction writers
• 21st-century African-American writers
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• 20th-century American academics
• African-American male writers

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