Peter H. Wood
American historian and professor
Peter Hutchins Wood (born 1943 in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American historian and author of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974). It is one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years. A former professor at Duke University in North Carolina, Wood is an adjunct professor in the History Department at the University of Colorado Boulder, where his wife, Elizabeth A. Fenn is a professor emeritus in the History Department.
Early life and education
The son of Barry Wood and Mary Lee Wood, Peter H. Wood was educated at the Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland, and Harvard University. He studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and returned to Harvard for a Ph.D. He played lacrosse while an undergraduate at Harvard and later at Oxford.
Wood wrote the original version of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion as his Ph.D. dissertation, which won the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. Published in 1974, it was part of major revisions in the ways historians studied African-American history and American slavery in particular.
African rice thesis
In Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974), Wood showed that South Carolina rice planters during the Colonial Era enslaved Africans specifically from the "Rice Coast" of West Africa because of their expertise in rice cultivation and its technology. The African region stretched between what is now Senegal and Gambia in the north to Sierra Leone and Liberia in the south.
The public source identifies “Peter H. Wood” as american historian and professor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Peter, Wood and American.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7174463. VIAF identifies the subject as 66509583. The Library of Congress control number is n82141509. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1943, 1670 and 1974.
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