A pioneer in the critical study of the Old South, William Edward Dodd, despite more than thirty years' residence in the urban North and abroad, remained throughout his life a son in spirit of the rural South into which he was born, and his reputation as a historian rests upon his writings that treat the region. His view of the South in its relationship with other sections informed his interpretation of the nation's past.

Dodd's perspective on regional and national history owed much to the circumstances of his youth. He was born in 1869 in Clayton, North Carolina, a farming community of some 300 families located near Raleigh, to John Daniel and Eveline Creech Dodd. After the Civil War, the lot of Southern yeoman farmers like the Dodds was a hard one. Dodd's grandfather had been prosperous enough to own a few slaves, but his father was hard put to...