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George Tindall: 85, Historian Who Charted the New South, Dies (NYT Obit)

George B. Tindall, a noted historian of the American South, died on Saturday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 85.

The cause was complications of diabetes, his daughter, Blair Tindall, said.

At his death, Professor Tindall was Kenan professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he had taught for more than 30 years.

Professor Tindall was known in particular for his work on the rise of the New South in the first half of the 20th century. His magnum opus was “The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945,” published in 1967 by Louisiana State University Press.

Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1994, the historian Charles B. Dew called the book one of “the twin peaks of New South historiography.” (The other was C. Vann Woodward’s “Origins of the New South, 1877-1913,” published by Louisiana State in 1951.)

Reviewing “The Emergence of the New South” in 1968, Library Journal said that Professor Tindall “has given so full a picture in so readable a style that the work should appeal to laymen as widely as it will to scholars.”

Professor Tindall was also known for “South Carolina Negroes, 1877-1900” (University of South Carolina, 1952), which traces the fortunes of blacks in the state from the end of Reconstruction to the start of the Jim Crow era. The book was released in a new edition by the same publisher in 2003.

George Brown Tindall was born on Feb. 26, 1921, in Greenville, S.C. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Furman University in 1942; a master’s degree in history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1948; and a Ph.D. in American history from North Carolina in 1951. During World War II, he served with the Army Air Force in the South Pacific....
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