E. MERTON COULTER (1890–1981) was an American historian and writer of the South, American Civil War, and Reconstruction, publishing twenty-six books on the subjects. He was a founding member of the Southern Historical Association. For forty years, he was a professor at the University of Georgia, where he was chair of the Department of History for eighteen years; for fifty years, he was editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly.
KEITH HEBERT is an associate professor and public history program officer at Auburn University. He is the author of The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains: Confederate Nationalism, Sectionalism, and White Supremacy in Bartow County, Georgia and Cornerstone of the Confederacy: Alexander H. Stephens and the Speech That Defined the Lost Cause.
E. MERTON COULTER came to the University of Georgia as an associate professor in 1919; he was named an emeritus professor of history in 1958 and continued to work on campus until his death in 1981. During his career, he wrote or edited more than thirty books and his contributions to periodicals were extensive. Coulter was coeditor of the ten–volume
History of the South and author of two of the volumes in the series; he also served as editor of the
Georgia Historical Quarterly for fifty years.