Faculty

David L. Carlton
Associate Professor of History

PhD, Yale, 1977

History of the American South; American Business History

Telephone:  615-322-3326
E-Mail: david.carlton@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: Mondays 1:30-3:00 pm, Wednesdays 2:30-4:00 pm
Office: 111 Benson

Personal web site: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/history/carltodl/carltodl.htm

David L. Carlton has been at Vanderbilt since 1983, having earlier taught at Texas Tech University and Coastal Carolina College.  Carlton has accepted an invitation to be a scholar in residence for the academic year 2010-2011 at a newly-established Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  The position comes with a fellowship stipend of $50,000.  During the year, Carlton will be working on a long-term project, “Strategies of Southern Development,” and participating in a fellows’ program organized around the theme “Globalization, the Economic Crisis, and North Carolina’s Future.”  He was chosen for this position because of his long-term scholarly interest in the economic development of the American South and the strategies southerners have used to tackle their development problems. He is the author of Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). Mill and Town finds the indigenous roots of industrialization in the economic revolution in the South resulting from the Civil War and Emancipation and the resulting expansion of a dynamic, town-dwelling middle class, and explores the tense relationship between these “town people” and the white working class recruited to work in the new mills. More recently, he has been attempting to define a “southern style” of industrialization by focusing on the character of the region’s entrepreneurs, the problems they faced as latecomers to industrialization, the nature of their resulting development strategies, and the implications of those strategies for the modern region in an era of accelerated globalization. He has published a number of essays on various aspects of this project, and has co-authored, with Peter A. Coclanis, The South, the Nation, and the World: Essays in Southern Economic Development (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1984). In addition, he frequently speaks on southern historical topics, particularly relating to the industrial South and economic development issues. He has served on advisory boards for H-South, the southern history discussion list of H-Net, for Atlanta History, and for the Journal of the Historical Society, and has consulted with museums and public agencies around the South. He is past President and current Secretary-Treasurer of the St. George Tucker Society, a limited-membership, interdisciplinary southern studies group. At Vanderbilt, he teaches the U. S. History survey (and has edited a documentary reader for the survey), the History of the American South, the History of American Enterprise, and on occasion the History of Appalachia.