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Richard S. Dunn

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Richard Slator Dunn (1928-) Richard S. Dunn retired in 1996 and was elected Professor Emeritus of History of the University of Pennsylvania. Richard Slator Dunn was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1928. His father, William P. Dunn was himself a Professor of English of the University of Minnesota. Richard graduated from Harvard College with his Bachelor of Art in 1950, and took his Masters of Art (1952) and Philosophical Doctorate in History (1955) at Princeton University, where he also started his teaching career in 1954. >"Belatedly and almost accidentally I became interested in the history of slavery... Eventually I drifted into American colonial history because I liked to work with Frank Craven, who taught at Princeton and was a specialist in the history of the seventeenth-century southern colonies.". After he completed his Ph.D., Richard taught at the University of Michigan from 1955 to 1957. He joined the faculty of the History Department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1957 and began working on his first book, published in 1962 as "Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630-1717". He was then promoted to Associate Professor in 1963 and after a year in England researching at the Public Record Office in the early 1960s he followed a new path of inquiry into the social development of the slave-based English Caribbean colonies of Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands during the course of the seventeenth century. Some time after his promotion to full Professor (1968) he completed both "The Age of Religious Wars, 1559-1689" (1970) and "Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713" (1972). >"The PRO's manuscript Barbados census of 1680 where a far more detailed and probing set of documents than any mainland census for the colonial period and I saw at once that here was the evidence I needed to analyze the social structure of this booming sugar colony".