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 ...

Life and career

Cooper studied at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

and

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...

. 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 n ...

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 {{US-historian-stub