Following his mid-career appointment to the Columbia University faculty in 1900, William Peterfield Trent won widespread recognition as a professor of English literature and as a literary historian. This fame has tended to obscure the fact that he was also a pioneering student of Southern history during the closing years of the nineteenth century.

The second of two children, William Peterfield Trent was born in Richmond, Virginia, on 10 November 1862. His older brother died in infancy. Both his parents--Peterfield Trent, a Richmond physician, and Lucy Carter Burwell Trent--were from distinguished Virginia families. As tobacco planters, merchants, landowners, and doctors, William Trent's paternal ancestors had long been influential citizens of Virginia. His grandfather Joseph Trent graduated with a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and his father received his M.D. from the University of Georgia. Though Peterfield Trent prospered as a physician during the 1850s, he lost his fortune...