Profile:
Michael Perman teaches courses on American history, in particular the American South, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and slavery and race relations. He has published three books based on archival research. Two of them covered politics in the Reconstruction South. Reunion Without Compromise (Cambridge U. Press,1973) explained the former Confederates’ response to the federal government’s terms for their readmission to the Union, while The Road to Redemption (U. of North Carolina Press,1984) investigated the political system established in the South under Reconstruction, showing how it operated and how it was later overthrown. The third, Struggle for Mastery (U. of North Carolina Press, 2001) examined the movement undertaken by the southern Democrats around 1900 to disfranchise almost all black voters and a large number of whites and thereby create the “Solid South.” A brief overview of post-Civil War America called Emancipation and Reconstruction (Harlan Davidson) appeared in a second edition in 2003. He is just completing a political history of the South since 1800, tentatively entitled “ In Pursuit of Unity” and he will deliver the Fleming Lectures in Southern History in spring 2007 on “The Southern Political Tradition."