April 21, 2000

Book on 18th-Century Black Culture Pays Off for Historian; Students Unhappy With Candidate for Head of Columbia's Latino-Studies Program

By COURTNEY LEATHERMAN and BEN GOSE

What a difference a book makes. Historians have long believed that Philip D. Morgan was a gifted scholar of the colonial era. With the publication of his first book, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), they were convinced of it. And the job offers have been pouring in -- from the Universities of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, the Johns Hopkins University, and Northwestern