E. Merton Coulter
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Ellis Merton Coulter (1890–1981) was an American historian and founding member of the Southern Historical Association. He was a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, and the author of several books on Reconstruction.
Both of Coulter's grandfathers served in the army of the Southern Confederacy. One of them survived the war but was indicted for Ku Klux Klan-related violence and acquitted by an all-black jury.[1]
He was a member of the Dunning School of historians, a generation of white historians hostile to civil rights for African Americans. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Coulter emerged as a leader of that generation of white southern historians who viewed the South's past with pride and defended its racist policies and practices. He framed his literary corpus to praise the Old South, glorify Confederate heroes, vilify northerners, and denigrate southern blacks."[2]
His books are considered by historians "to be historical apologies justifying Southern secession, defending the Confederate cause, and condemning Reconstruction" as did his teacher, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton. Coulter's books were used in the mid-20th century as a basis for maintaining Jim Crow segregation and opposing civil rights reform.
In the introduction to Freedom's Lawmakers historian Eric Foner wrote: "Anti-Reconstruction scholars faithfully echoed Democratic propaganda of the post-Civil War years. "The Negroes," wrote E. Merton Coulter in 1947, "were fearfully unprepared to occupy positions of rulership," and black officeholding was "the most spectacular and exotic development in government in the history of white civilization...(and the) longest to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated."
Foner also noted that as late as 1968, Coulter, "The last wholly antagonistic scholar of the era, described Georgia's most prominent Reconstruction black officials as swindlers and "scamps," and suggested that whatever positive qualities they possessed were inherited from white ancestors." [Freedom's Lawmakers, xii, and E. Merton Coulter, The South during Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (Baton Rouge, 1947), 141-44; Coulter, Black Legislators, 119-20, 180.]
[edit] Books
- A Short History of Georgia (1933, 1947, and 1960)
- History of Georgia (1954) a junior high school textbook
- The South During Reconstruction (1947)
- Confederate States of America (1952)
- William G. Brownlow: Fighting Parson of the Southern Highlands (1939)
[edit] External link
[edit] References
- Fred A. Bailey, "E. Merton Coulter," in Reading Southern History: Essays on Interpreters and Interpretations, ed. Glenn Feldman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001).
- "A Few Words about E. Merton Coulter," Georgia Historical Quarterly 58 (spring 1974): 6-24.
- Foner, Eric. Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory Of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, Revised, 1996, LSU Press.
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