As a boy growing up in rural Georgia, William L. Ramsey played among old Confederate earthworks and searched for Civil War bullets in the red clay. He listened to stories of the family’s arrival with James Edward Oglethorpe in 1733 and developed an abiding fascination for the power that the past exerts over our present lives. As an adult, the enigmas of southern history continue to frame his efforts both as a historian and a poet.

The results of Ramsey’s work are sometimes disquieting for those who would valorize the Old South uncritically, especially with respect to his scholarship on the Indian slave trade, slavery, and Indian-white relations during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His first book, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South, explores the origins and historical legacies of one of the most significant (and understudied) events in southern history.

Ramsey received his Ph.D. in American History in 1998 from Tulane University and has taught at Tulane, SUNY-Oswego, and the University of Idaho, where he received the Martin Luther King, Jr., Distinguished Service Award in 2005 for public activism in support of racial tolerance and Civil Rights. In 2007, the Student Association of the University of Idaho awarded him the Outstanding Faculty Award. Ramsey’s historical writing has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including the prestigious Journal of American History. His poetry has appeared over the last 20 years in several dozen literary periodicals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Hellas, Lullwater Review, Snake Nation Review, and he has work appearing or forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, and Blue Unicorn. Dr. Ramsey is currently Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History and Philosophy at Lander University in South Carolina.