Charles Dew

Charles B. Dew is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History, Emeritus, at Williams College. A native of St. Petersburg, Florida, he attended North Ward Elementary School and Mirror Lake Junior High School before graduating from Woodberry Forest School in Virginia in 1954 and from Williams College in 1958; he received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied under C. Vann Woodward, in 1964. He taught at Wayne State University, Louisiana State University, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and the University of Virginia before returning to teach at Williams in 1977. Professor Dew retired in 2020 following forty-three years as a member of the Williams faculty. His teaching there focused on the American South, the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the institution of slavery. His most recent book is The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade. Earlier scholarship includes: Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge; Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War; and Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Ironworks. Ironmaker to the Confederacy and Apostles of Disunion both 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, and Bond of Iron received the Elliot Rudwick Prize from the Organizations of American Historians and was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. In a semester when many of his History Department colleagues will be on leave, he will be returning to the classroom in the spring of 2022 to teach his research seminar, HIST 456 “The Civil War & the Era of Reconstruction.”