Education

• B.A. University of South Carolina
• M.A. University of Wisconsin
• Ph.D. University North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bio

Dan Carter, University of South Carolina Professor emeritus, is the author and editor of seven books including Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South; When the War Was Over: the Failure of Self Reconstruction in the South; From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution and The Politics of Rage, a biography of George Wallace. The Pitt Professor of American Institutions at Cambridge University in 1995-96,  he has served as a professor at the Universities of Maryland, Wisconsin, Emory and South Carolina and as a visiting scholar at London’s Westminster University, the University of Genoa, The Roosevelt Center (Netherlands), the University of Richmond and the National Humanities Center. 

A native of South Carolina, Professor Carter is the recipient of eight major literary and academic awards for his work including the Bancroft Prize in history and the Robert F. Kennedy Prize.  Former President of the Southern Historical Association, he has contributed opinion essays to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times as well as serving as on-camera commentator and consultant on more than twenty historical documentaries.  He won an Emmy in 2001 for the PBS documentary, “Settin’ the Woods on Fire”: George Wallace and the Politics of Rage.  He has also served as historical consultant and expert witness in four voting rights’ legal cases.  Since his retirement in 2010, he has lived full time in Brevard, North Carolina with his wife, Jane.  In April of 2023, NewSouth Press, a trade imprint of the University of Georgia Press, published Unmasking the Klansman: The Double Life of Asa and Forrest Carter, a biography of Asa Carter, a violent Klan activist of the 1950’s, a passionate white Christian nationalist and secret speechwriter for George Wallace in the 1960s.  In the 1970s, he assumed a fake identity as “Forrest” Carter, a  “Cherokee American” writer and. Over the next decade he became a best-selling author with three novels including The Outlaw Josey Wales (made into a well-known film by Clint Eastwood) and a fake memoir of his “Indian childhood, The Education of Little Tree.