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David C. Tambo

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 8, 2026
Entity authorityQ64740119
Source-derived summary

David C. Tambo is a historian of slavery in pre-colonial Nigeria, editor for the Nigerian oral histories of the Plateau History Project in the 1980s, former head of archives and special collections at Ball State University, and later director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara. His archives form the Tambo Nigerian History Collection at U.C. Santa Barbara.

Early life and family

Tambo worked as a volunteer for the Peace Corps in Bauchi, Nigeria, from 1968 to 1970. He received his M.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1974.

He married Shirley.

Career

From 1975 to 1976, Tambo undertook doctoral (uncompleted) fieldwork on the economic history of Nigeria, in Vom, researching the interaction between the Jos Plateau people and the Sokoto Caliphate in the pre-colonial period. In the early 1980s he was part of the Plateau History Project, contributing to its oral history series. He was head of archives and special collections at Ball State University. Later he was director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the Davidson Library, University of California Santa Barbara.

Archives

Tambo's archives of his visits to Nigeria for the Peace Corps and as an academic researcher are the subject of the Tambo Nigerian History Collection of the University of California, Santa Barbara where they are held in 7 cartons, 3 document boxes, and 104 audio cassettes, along with digital files.

Editorial summary

“David C. Tambo” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what David, Tambo and Open-knowledge can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1968, 1970, 1974, 1975—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around David, Tambo and Open-knowledge.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“David C. Tambo” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, David, Tambo and Open-knowledge provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q64740119. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968, 1970, 1974 and 1975.

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Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from David C. Tambo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.