Lois E. Horton

Lois Horton died September 22, 2021. Professor emerita of history at George Mason University, Horton was a leading historian of antebellum Black culture, abolitionism, and the public history of slavery. She earned a Ph.D. in social policy at the Florence Heller School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare at Brandeis University, while her husband James Oliver Horton (elected April 2000, died 2017) completed his Ph.D. in the history of American civilization at Brandeis. Together the Hortons produced many significant books, including Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (1975); A History of the African American People (1995); and Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (2006). Her last monograph, Harriet Tubman and the Fight for Freedom, appeared in 2013; she also consulted for government agencies and for numerous museums on exhibitions about Black history and race. Together she and her husband served as the Society’s Mellon Distinguished Scholars in Residence in 2010–11.