Bell Irvin Wiley

Bell Irvin Wiley (born January 5, 1906 in Halls , Lauderdale County , Tennessee , † April 4, 1980 ) was an American historian specializing in the lives of ordinary people in the American Civil War .

Wiley grew up on the family's cotton farm in western Tennessee, studied English at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, received a master's degree in history from the University of Kentucky in Lexington in 1929 and received his doctorate in 1933 under Ulrich Bonnell Phillips at Yale University , the most famous specialist in the history of slavery in the USA at the time. His dissertation, Southern Negroes, 1861-1865 , dealt with the life of blacks in the civil war and dispelled the notion that they had waited submissively and satisfied with their position for the end of the war. Instead, despite draconian countermeasures in the south, many fled, there was revolt and sabotage, and often abandoned their former slave owners as soon as they could.

In 1934 he became a professor at State Teachers College, now the University of Southern Mississippi , in 1938 at the University of Mississippi , Louisiana State University and from 1935 to 1939 at Peabody College . During World War II he served in the US Army . From 1949 until his retirement in 1974 he was a professor at Emory University .

He was particularly concerned with social history in the American Civil War. In particular, he is known for two books on the life of the common soldier in the Army of the Southern States (often called Johnny Reb , for rebel) and Northern States ( Billy Yank ). They are based on studying tens of thousands of letters.

In 1955 he was President of the Southern Historians Association and in 1961 Chairman of the National Civil War Centennial Commission. He was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.

He had been married to Mary Frances Harrison since 1938 and had two sons. His wife was also his (unofficial) research assistant.

Fonts

• Cotton and slavery in the history of West Tennessee. University of Kentucky, Lexington KY 1929 (Master's thesis).
• Southern Negroes. 1861-1865 (= Yale Historical Publications. Miscellany. Vol. 31, ISSN  0084-3350 ). Yale University Press et al., New Haven CT et al. 1938 (dissertation)
• The Plain People of the Confederacy. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA 1943.
• The life of Johnny Reb. The common soldier of Confederacy. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis IN 1943 (Updated edition, with a new foreword by James I. Robertson, Jr. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA et al. 2008, ISBN 978-0-8071-3325-5 ).
• The life of Billy Yank. The common soldier of the Union. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis IN 1952 (Updated edition, with a new foreword by James I. Robertson, Jr. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA et al. 2009, ISBN 978-0-8071-3375-0 ).
• The road to Appomattox. Memphis State College Press, Memphis TN 1956.
• The common soldier of the civil was. Grosset & Dunlap, New York NY 1958.
• Confederate Women (= Contributions in American History. Vol. 38). Greenwood Press, Westport CT et al. 1975, ISBN 0-8371-7534-8 .
• Hill Jordan, James I. Robertson Jr., Joe H. Segars (Eds.): The Bell Irvin Wiley Reader. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA 2001, ISBN 0-8071-2579-2 .

He also gave letters and memoirs, for example from Confederates, but also from liberated slaves out of Liberia.

literature

• James I. Robertson, Richard M. McMurry (Eds.) Rank and file. Civil War essays in honor of Bell Irvin Wiley. Presidio Press, San Rafael CA 1976, ISBN 0-89141-011-2 .
• Richard M. McMurry: Bell Irvin Wiley, 1906-1980. In: Civil War History. Vol. 26, No. 3, September 1980, ISSN  0009-8078 , pp. 270-272, doi : 10.1353 / cwh.1980.0021 .

Web links

• biography
• Wiley Papers, Emory University