Stanley Harrold is professor of history at South Carolina State University, where he teaches the American history survey and upper level courses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Colonial and Revolutionary America, and American Constitutional History.

He has a B.A. in history from Allegheny College, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in nineteenth-century American history from Kent State University.  He is active in the Organization of American Historians, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Southern Historical Association.  Over the past eight years he has spoken at seminars and workshops conducted at a variety of universities.

Harrold’s research and writing concentrates on the American antislavery movement during the decades prior to the Civil War.  He has also written about the southern reaction to the antislavery movement and about African-American history from the colonial period to the Civil War era.  He has written for a variety of history journals and is a frequent contributor to encyclopedias.  

Among his books are:  Gamaliel Bailey and Antislavery Union (Kent State University Press, 1986), The Abolitionists and the South 1831-1861 (University Press of Kentucky, 1995; paper edition 1999), Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, coeditor with John R. McKivigan (University of Tennessee Press, 1999), American Abolitionists (Longman/Pearson Education, 1999), Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C. 1828-1865 (Louisiana State University Press, 2003), The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (University Press of Kentucky, 2004); Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Reader (John Wiley and Sons, 2007), Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Harrold is also coauthor, with Darlene Clark Hine and William C. Hine, of the world’s best-selling African-American history textbook and is coeditor, with Randall M. Miller, of a book series published by the University Press of Florida.  The textbook is The African-American Odyssey.  First published in 2000, the Odyssey, which is designed for college courses, is now in its fifth edition.  There are also concise and high school versions of the text.  The book series is Southern Dissent, which began in 1999, includes eighteen books, six of which have won awards.

Harrold received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1991-92 (for The Abolitionists and the South) and 1996-97 (for Subversives).  In 2005-6 he received a Faculty Research Award (for Border War) from the same organization.  Border War in 2011 received an honorable mention in the competition for the Lincoln Prize.  Harrold is currently working on a book-length study of the abolitionist impact on government policy from the early eighteenth century to the Civil War.