Ephraim Williams Professor of American History

B.A. (1958) Williams College

Ph.D. (1964) The Johns Hopkins University

 

Charles.B.Dew@williams.edu

Stetson C16

413.597.2597

 

Office Hours

Thursdays 1:30-3:45

 

Courses

HIST 164: Slavery in the American South

HIST 364: History of the Old South

HIST 365: History of the New South

HIST 370: Studies in American Social Change

HIST 456: Civil War and Reconstruction

 

Research

Ante-Bellum U.S. History; Slavery in the U.S.; U.S. South

 

Thesis Students

David Gise '01, Grant and Sherman

Sergio Espinosa '02, The Sherman Reservation: Land for the Freedmen

Stokley Weinberg '02, The Massachusetts 54th Regiment

 

 

Selected Publications

Books:

Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).  Recipient of the 2001 Fletcher Pratt Award, given by the Civil War Round Table of New York for the best non-fiction book on the American Civil War published in 2001.

Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffolo Forge. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994).  Recipient of the 1995 Elliott Rudwick Prize, chosen as the Finalist for the 1995 Lincoln Prize, and selected as a Notable Book of the Year for 1994 by the The New York Times Book Review.  Norton paperback edition, 1995.

Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966; revised edition, forthcoming, Library of Virginia, 1998).  Recipient of a 1967 Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History.  Recipient of the 1966 Fletcher Pratt Award, given by the Civil War Round Table of New York.

Articles and Essays:

“Industrial Slavery,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Seymour Drescher, eds., Encyclopedia of Slavery (New York: Garland Publishing, forthcoming, 1997).

“Slavery and Technology in the Antebellum Southern Iron Industry: The Case of Buffalo Forge,” in Ronald L. Numbers and Todd L. Savitt, eds., Science and Medicine in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 107-126.

“The Slavery Experience,” in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 120-161.

“Sam Williams, Forgeman: The Life of an Industrial Slave in the Old South,” in James M. McPherson and J. Morgan Kousser eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 199-239.