About the Author

Charles B. Dew is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College and the author of the Fletcher Pratt Award-winning Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Virginia) and Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge, selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Reviews

Each one of Charles Dew’s books has helped shape the conversation on the history of race in this nation. His new book, which combines an honest autobiography of life in the 1950s with a sobering account of archival history and reckoning, is a characteristically eloquent reflection. Dew allows us to understand just how deeply racial thinking saturated white southerners who were otherwise admirable people. Charles Dew is one of our wisest and most humane historians.–Edward L. Ayers, University of Richmond, author of The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction.