Edward L. Ayers

Biography

Edward L. Ayers is an American historian and the ninth president of the University of Richmond.  His book In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864 won the Bancroft Prize in 2004.

See Work

CRITICISM / Autumn 1989

The Heart of American History

By Edward L. Ayers

The era of the Civil War and Reconstruction remains the crucible of American history, the trial that decisively defined this country and its self-perceived mission. The American people seem to recognize that fact, for no era in our history...

ESSAYS / Spring 2000

A Southern Chronicle

By Edward L. Ayers

Since the founding of The Virginia Quarterly Review, one topic has turned up again and again: the journal’s native region. The culture, economy, past, and future of the American South have presented the Review with a constantly changing and...

ESSAYS / Summer 1987

Everyman As Master

By Edward L. Ayers

Even now, after a century and hundreds of studies, we can draw no coherent picture of the slaveholders of the Old South. Instead, our images are kaleidoscopic, fragmentary, contradictory. These men appear, alternately, as tyrannical and...