E. Merton Coulter

Who was E. Merton Coulter?

Ellis Merton Coulter was an American historian of the South, author, and a founding member of the Southern Historical Association. Like nearly all Southern scholars of his day, he believed in segregation and white supremacy. For four decades, he was a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, where he was chair of the History Department for 18 years. He was editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly for 50 years, and published 26 books on the American Civil War and Reconstruction; his study of Kentucky remains especially valuable. He was coeditor to the major collaborative scholarly history of the South.