Biography
Charles B. Dew teaches American history, the history of the South, and the Civil War & Reconstruction. A native of St. Petersburg, Florida, he attended Woodberry Forest School in Viriginia and Williams College prior to completing his Ph.D. degree at the Johns Hopkins University under the direction of C. Vann Woodward. He is the author of three books: Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works; Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge; and Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Two of these works, Ironmaker to the Confederacy and Apostles of Disunion, received the Fletcher Pratt Award, given by the Civil War Roundtable of New York for the best non-fiction book on the Civil War in its year of publication. Bond of Iron was awarded the Organization of American Historians’ Elliott Rudwick Prize and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize.
Selected Publications
Books:
The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade. (University of Virginia Press, 2016).
Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). A 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 Buffalo Forge. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994). A 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. A 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). A Recipient of a 1967 Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History A 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, 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.
Research Interests
Ante-Bellum U.S. History; Slavery in the U.S.; U.S. South
Theses Advised
Jackson Myers ’17 – “A New Era in our Politicks”: John C. Calhoun and the Legacy of the Founders, 1811-1817
Joshua Morrison ’16 – Labor Race, and Food: Mary Chesnut’s Reconstruction
Nataly Garzon ’14 – Pioneering White, Black and Brown: Textile Labor in Greenville, South Carolina
Nathaniel Sutton 14 – Sandusky County, Ohio: A Community at War
Thomas Daubert ’13 – A Cause Not Lost: The Unyielding Struggle of Confederate Veterans to Preserve White Supremacy During North Carolina’s Reconstruction
Kevin O’Connell ’13 – Ideology and Infrastructure: Internal Improvements & the American Constitution
Williams Harron ’11 – The Northern Home Front and Lee’s Gettysburg Invasion
Mary Freeman ’11 – Letters Home: Common Soldiers in the American Civil War
Margot Bernstein ’10 – Preston Smith Brooks in the Verbal and the Visual: Showing Face to Save Face and Avoid Disgrace in the Antebellum South
Ben Davidson ’10 – ‘Arches of Fire’: The Civil War and its Aftermath in the Minds of White Southern Children
Kevin Waite ’09 – The Masculine Divide: Violence, Manhood, and Nationalism in the Plain Folk South, 1820-1861
Nick Carter ’07 – Contesting Cultural Explanations of Poverty: Migration and Economic Development in New Orleans, 1965-1980
Emma Reynolds ’07 – “Let Us Persevere in the Good Work”: The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the American Civil War
Kevin Koernig ’05 – Resolute Scheme: How Ulysses S. Grant Won the Civil War
Stokley Weinberg 02 – The 54th Massachusetts Regiment: Fighting for Equality
David Gise ’01 – The Indispensable Men: Grant, Sherman, and Union Victory
Jonathan Eades ’95 – Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet: A Study in the Historiography of the American Civil War
Amy Hansen ’94 – Redefining Mastery: Civil War and Reconstruction Transition Through the Eyes of Samuel A. Agnew, Mississippi Planter
Graham Gerst ’93 – French Foreign Policy and the Belgian Revolution of 1830
(with John Hyde)
Lewis Collins ’88 – John Singleton Mosby and Confederate Guerrilla Warfare in the Civil War
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