After several years of declining health, Dewey Wesley Grantham died on August 26, 2004, in Nashville, at the age of eighty-three. Professor Grantham was born March 16, 1921, in Manassas, Georgia, and grew up in the impoverished rural South of the 1920s and 1930s. After graduating from the University of Georgia in 1942, he served during World War II as a lieutenant in the Coast Guard. After the war he used the G.I. Bill to pursue a doctorate in history, joining Fletcher M. Green's celebrated seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After receiving his doctorate in 1949, he began his teaching career with a one-year stint at North Texas State College (now the University of North Texas), followed by two years at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro). In 1952 he joined the history department at Vanderbilt University; he rose quickly and easily through the ranks at Vanderbilt, finally becoming the Holland M. McTyeire Professor of History in 1977, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1991. He played the central role in building Vanderbilt's graduate program in history, and through his students, as much as his writing, he shaped our understanding of the modern American South. He was a longtime and active participant in the Southern Historical Association, serving as its president in 1966.
From Grantham's pen, typewriter, and computer flowed a flood of books over the years, dealing mainly, but not exclusively, with American, especially southern, politics and policy in the twentieth century. His first book, Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge), appeared in 1958 and won the Charles S. Sydnor Prize. His 1962 Lamar Lectures at Mercer University became the brief, elegant The Democratic South (Athens, Ga., 1963). His massively detailed study of the Progressive Era in the South, tellingly titled Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville), appeared in 1983, followed in the next decade by The Life and Death of the Solid South: A Political History (Lexington, Ky., 1988) and The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York, 1994).
From Grantham's pen, typewriter, and computer flowed a flood of books over the years, dealing mainly, but not exclusively, with American, especially southern, politics and policy in the twentieth century. His first book, Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge), appeared in 1958 and won the Charles S. Sydnor Prize. His 1962 Lamar Lectures at Mercer University became the brief, elegant The Democratic South (Athens, Ga., 1963). His massively detailed study of the Progressive Era in the South, tellingly titled Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville), appeared in 1983, followed in the next decade by The Life and Death of the Solid South: A Political History (Lexington, Ky., 1988) and The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York, 1994).
After several years of declining health, Dewey Wesley Grantham died on August 26, 2004, in Nashville, at the age of eighty-three. Professor Grantham was born March 16, 1921, in Manassas, Georgia, and grew up in the impoverished rural South of the 1920s and 1930s. After graduating from the University of Georgia in 1942, he served during World War II as a lieutenant in the Coast Guard. After the war he used the G.I. Bill to pursue a doctorate in history, joining Fletcher M. Green's celebrated seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After receiving his doctorate in 1949, he began his teaching career with a one-year stint at North Texas State College (now the University of North Texas), followed by two years at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro). In 1952 he joined the history department at Vanderbilt University; he rose quickly and easily through the ranks at Vanderbilt, finally becoming the Holland M. McTyeire Professor of History in 1977, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1991. He played the central role in building Vanderbilt's graduate program in history, and through his students, as much as his writing, he shaped our understanding of the modern American South. He was a longtime and active participant in the Southern Historical Association, serving as its president in 1966.
From Grantham's pen, typewriter, and computer flowed a flood of books over the years, dealing mainly, but not exclusively, with American, especially southern, politics and policy in the twentieth century. His first book, Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge), appeared in 1958 and won the Charles S. Sydnor Prize. His 1962 Lamar Lectures at Mercer University became the brief, elegant The Democratic South (Athens, Ga., 1963). His massively detailed study of the Progressive Era in the South, tellingly titled Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville), appeared in 1983, followed in the next decade by The Life and Death of the Solid South: A Political History (Lexington, Ky., 1988) and The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York, 1994).
From Grantham's pen, typewriter, and computer flowed a flood of books over the years, dealing mainly, but not exclusively, with American, especially southern, politics and policy in the twentieth century. His first book, Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge), appeared in 1958 and won the Charles S. Sydnor Prize. His 1962 Lamar Lectures at Mercer University became the brief, elegant The Democratic South (Athens, Ga., 1963). His massively detailed study of the Progressive Era in the South, tellingly titled Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville), appeared in 1983, followed in the next decade by The Life and Death of the Solid South: A Political History (Lexington, Ky., 1988) and The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York, 1994).
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