William J. Cooper Jr. (born October 22, 1940) is an American historian who specializes in the
history of the American South, and is regarded as a leading expert on the life of
Jefferson Davis
Jefferson F. Davis (June 3, 1808December 6, 1889) was an American politician who served as the president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. He represented Mississippi in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives as a ...
.
Life and career
Cooper studied at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...
and
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...
. After two years of service as an officer in the
U.S. Army
The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cl ...
, he went on to spend his entire academic career at
Louisiana State University
Louisiana State University (officially Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, commonly referred to as LSU) is a public land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The university was founded in 1860 nea ...
.
Works
*''The Conservative Regime: South Carolina, 1877-1890'' (1968)
*''The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828-56'' (1979)
*''Liberty and Slavery'' (1983)
*''The American South: A History'' (1996) (with
Tom E. Terrill)
*''Jefferson Davis, American'' (2000)
*''Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era'' (2008)
*''We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861'' (2012)
*''The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics'' (2017)
*''Approaching Civil War and Southern History'' (2019)
References
External links
*
Living people
1940 births
American historians
Princeton University alumni
Johns Hopkins University alumni
Louisiana State University faculty
Historians of the Southern United States
People from Kingstree, South Carolina
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