Harry L. Watson
A native of Greensboro, North Carolina, Harry L. Watson is the Atlanta Distinguished Professor in Southern Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 1976. He writes and teaches on the antebellum South, the early American republic, and the state of North Carolina. Watson has published eight books, including Building the American Republic, Volume I: A Narrative History to 1877 (2018) and Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (1990, revised edition 2006), and four collections of edited documents and essays. He directed the Uuniversity’s Center for the Study of the American South from 1999 to 2012 and coedited Southern Cultures, its quarterly journal, from 1993 to 2019. He has also been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and has served as the president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.