Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, he has lived and worked for more than twenty years in Georgia. While rising through the ranks in the Albany State University Department of History, Formwalt founded The Journal of Southwest Georgia History and has served as editor since 1983. Much of his scholarly career has been devoted to recounting the life and work of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the English-born architect who designed the magnificent Roman Catholic Cathedral in Baltimore and served as architect of the United States Capitol under Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. In addition to his dissertation on Latrobe's role in developing and promoting internal improvements in the New Republic, Formwalt helped turn the architect's prodigious corpus of writings into five volumes of the published Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Yale, 1977-1986). He also published articles on African American politics in Georgia after the Civil War, interracial marriage during Reconstruction, cotton production in the Confederacy, and late eighteenth-century U.S.-Creek relations. At Albany State, he has taught courses in Russian history, world history, southern and Georgia history, and historical methods, and has directed several advanced high school workshops. Most recently, he was instrumental in securing three grants totaling $1.2 million to realize a special sort of dream: the conversion of Old Mount Zion Church--where Martin Luther King spoke in the early 1960s--into the Albany Civil Rights Movement Museum. He has been an active OAH member for almost thirty years, and belongs to a dozen other scholarly organizations. "In addition to continuing the OAH's leadership in American history scholarship, I want to reach out to historians practicing at all levels of the profession by building stronger links with state and regional historical organizations," says Formwalt. "One thing that all historians have in common is their role as teachers. For many of us that role is played out in a classroom; for others it takes place in a museum, a national or state park, public or private archives, or a research library. Research historians produce works that teachers then use in the classroom." In the end, notes Formwalt, "we are all engaged in the process of helping others to think about and understand the past."

The Organization of American Historians was founded in 1907 as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. With approximately 12,000 members, it is the largest professional organization for the investigation, study, and teaching of American history. The membership includes college and university professors, high school teachers, students, archivists, public historians, and institutional members such as libraries, museums, and history-related organizations, as well as 900 individual and institutional foreign members. The OAH holds an annual meeting each spring and publishes the Journal of American History, the OAH Newsletter, and the OAH Magazine of History.