William L. Barney is Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has specialized in the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, especially the Civil War period, and is the author of The Road to Secession (1972), Flawed Victory: A New Perception of the Civil War (1975), and co-edited The American Journey: A History of the United States (1997). In 1987 he was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Genoa in Italy and served as Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor at the University of North Carolina from 1990 to 1993.