Michael Wayne (historian)

Michael Wayne is a Canadian historian of the United States at the University of Toronto.[1] He is a senior fellow at University College. As an undergraduate, Wayne studied at the University of Toronto and Amherst College. He received his PhD from Yale University[2] where he studied under C. Vann Woodward.

Wayne writes primarily about the American South and race relations in the United States. His major works include The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860–1880 dealing, in part, with impact of Sharecropping and intermarriage between the White elite,[3] Death of an Overseer: Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South, and Imagining Black America. An Old South Morality Play: Reconsidering the Social Underpinnings of the Proslavery Ideology challenged popular views of class structure in the slaveholding South.[4] The Reshaping of Plantation Society won the 1983 Saloutos Book Award of the Agricultural History Society.[5] In The black population of Canada West on the eve of the American Civil War: A reassessment based on the manuscript census of 1861 he disputes the narrative that the typical Black resident of the Canadian West were fugitive slaves.[6]

He also wrote a satirical novel dealing with the follies of academia and the peculiarities of Canadian and American identities; titled Lincoln's Briefs, it has been published by Canadian Scholars' Press.[7][8]

Michael Wayne is the son of Johnny Wayne, who was a member of the Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster.[8]