Dr. Orville Vernon Burton
Co-Chair of Green Book Publication Committee
Dr. Burton holds degrees in History from Furman University and Princeton University. He is the past president of the Southern Historical Association and the Agricultural History Society. Burton is a member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He was inducted into the Society of American Historians and in 2015, the South Carolina Academy of Authors.
In 2017, he received the Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities from the South Carolina Humanities Council. He received the Benjamin E Mays Legacy Award in 2022, and Morehouse College inducted him into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collegium of Scholars. In 1999, he was named U.S. Research and Doctorial University Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation and named the Eugene Asher Distinguished Teacher for 2003 by the American Historical Association.
He is the author of Class, Conflict, and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies (1982), In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (1987), A Gentleman and an Officer: A Military and Social History of James B Griffin’s Civil War (1996), The Free Flag of Cuba: The Last Novel of Lucy Holcombe Pickens (2002), The Age of Lincoln (2008), Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court with Armand Derfner (2022) and Reconstruction beyond 150: Reassessing the New Birth of Freedom with J Brent Morris (2023).