Background and Early Life
Coulter was the son of the moderately wealthy John Ellis Coulter, a merchant and land speculator in the small town of Connelly Springs, North Carolina, in the western Piedmont. His father had hoped his son would go into the ministry, but Coulter chose history instead.
Both of Coulter's grandfathers served in the Confederate States Army. One fell in the Civil War while the other during Reconstruction was indicted for Ku Klux Klan-related violence and acquitted by an all-white jury.
Coulter earned his undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina (UNC), mentored by J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, a prominent historian who emphasized how Southern whites had suffered under Reconstruction and the lack of readiness of freedmen and blacks for suffrage. In 1914 Coulter entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison for graduate doctoral work, where he studied under additional professors sympathetic to Southern thinking about the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Read more about this topic: E. Merton Coulter
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