Jan 29, 2017
Charles B. Dew teaches the history of the South and the Civil War and Reconstruction at Williams College, where he is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History. A native of St. Petersburg, Florida, he graduated from Woodberry Forest School in Virginia and Williams College prior to completing his Ph.D. degree at the Johns Hopkins University under the direction of C. Vann Woodward. He is the author of four books: Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works; Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge; Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War; and The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade. Two of these books, Ironmaker to the Confederacy and Apostles of Disunion, received the Fletcher Pratt Award, given by the Civil War Roundtable of New York for the best non-fiction book on the Civil War in its year of publication. Bond of Iron was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, was awarded the Organization of American Historians’ Elliott Rudwick Prize, and was a Finalist for the Lincoln Prize. The Making of a Racist was published in 2016 by the University of Virginia Press, and this same publisher will be bringing out a Fifteenth Anniversary Edition of Apostles of Disunion early in 2017.