Philip D. Curtin, a wide-ranging and influential historian whose pioneering use of modern statistical methods to determine the extent of the Atlantic slave trade suggested that far fewer slaves were transported from Africa than had previously been thought, died June 4 in West Chester, Pa. He was 87 and lived in Kennett Square, Pa.
At the University of Wisconsin, where he began teaching in 1956, he and a colleague, Jan Vansina, started a department of African languages and literature, helping to establish African studies as an academic discipline in the United States. From 1975 until his retirement in 1998, he taught at Johns Hopkins.