Justice Deferred, The Age of Lincoln, and In My Father's House were nominated for Pulitzers.
CLEMSON, SC, January 12, 2023 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Orville Vernon Burton, PhD, has been inducted into Marquis Who's Who. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Dr. Burton has led a long and successful career in education for more than 45 years, and since 1980 has served as an expert witness for minority plaintiffs in discrimination and voting rights court cases due to his expertise in race relations. Having joined the department of history at Clemson University in 2010 and becoming recognized as the inaugural Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History and Professor of Global Black Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, and Computer Science, he presently teaches American History, Southern History, and Digital History. Dr. Burton also notably served as the director of the Clemson University CyberInstitute from 2010 to 2016.
Dr. Burton was a Burroughs distinguished professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University between 2008 and 2010. Between 1974 and 2008 he was at the University of Illinois, a professor of U.S. history, African American studies, and sociology and was also deemed "Distinguished Teacher/Scholar." Furthermore, Dr. Burton was a senior research scientist and served as Associate Director for Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and was the founding director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science. In addition, Burton serves as the executive director of the College of Charleston's Low Country and Atlantic World Program.
As an extension of his contributions as a scholar, Dr. Burton has been widely published in his area of expertise over the past four decades as an author/co-author and editor of more than two dozen books and approximately 300 scholarly articles and author or director of numerous digital humanities projects. Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court (coauthored, Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2021) was deemed "authoritative and highly readable" by reviewer Randall Kennedy of Harvard University Law School in The Nation. The Age of Lincoln (2007) won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Award for Nonfiction and was selected for Book of the Month Club, History Book Club, and Military Book Club. One reviewer proclaimed, "If the Civil War era was America's 'Iliad,' then historian Orville Vernon Burton is our latest Homer." In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (1985) was a highly quantified, computerized, and methodologically sophisticated analysis of the white and Black family. Justice Deferred, The Age of Lincoln, and In My Father's House were nominated for Pulitzers.
Aside from his full-time commitments in the field, Dr. Burton served on several boards, and was the interim chair and subsequently vice chair of the board of directors for the Congressional National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Foundation between 2009 and 2017.
Upon graduating from public high school in Ninety Six, South Carolina, Dr. Burton pursued a Bachelor of Arts in history at Furman University, graduating magna cum laude in 1969. At Princeton University, he earned a Master of Art and a Doctor of Philosophy in American history with a minor in European history. Dr. Burton also served in the U.S. Army before being honorably discharged as a captain in 1977. His father Orville Burton was a disabled Marine veteran of the undeclared war in China before World War II, and died in 1954. From the age of seven, Dr. Burton was reared by his mother, and he credits much of his success to the love of his mother, her model of hard work, and her life of faith.
Dr. Burton's career has been greatly supported through memberships with several prominent professional organizations. Among them, he is active with the American Historical Association, the Society of American Historians, the Organization of American Historians, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and the Social Science History Association. He was elected as the president of the Agricultural History Society and the Southern Historical Association.
Throughout his professional career, Dr. Burton has received many grants and fellowships from organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, and many others. Additionally, he has received numerous awards and recognitions for his teachings. These include U.S. Research and Doctoral University Professor of the Year (presented by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education) and the American Historical Association's Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Prize. For his writing contributions, Dr. Burton was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors and received the Benjamin E. Mays Legacy Award. His research garnered the Clemson University Alumni Award for Outstanding Achievements in Research and the Southern Historical Association's John Hope Franklin Lifetime Achievement Award. Most recently the College of Charleston's Low Country and Atlantic World Program honored Burton by creating the Vernon Burton Research Award, and Dr. Burton was appointed to the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission, and inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College. Other accolades include a South Carolina Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities in 2017 and a special resolution from the Illinois State Legislature for his contributions as a scholar, teacher, and citizen of the state.
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