John Wesley Blassingame.

John W. Blassingame (1940-2000) was a distinguished historian of 19th-century African American culture and politics at Yale University, where he began to teach in 1970. Blassingame had an impressive publication record. He published a revision of his Yale dissertation as 'The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South' (1972), which became his best-known work. He assumed editorship of the 'Papers of Frederick Douglass,' and between 1979 and 1999 he led the publication of six volumes. In 1982 he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.