William C. Davis (historian)

2000s In 2000, Davis became a professor at Virginia Tech, where he served as director of programs for the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. He retired from this position in 2013.

In 1996, Davis authored the book The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy, a critical examination of mythical claims made by neo-Confederates and Lost Cause members regarding the Confederacy and the American Civil War. Davis states that "it is impossible to point to any other local issue but slavery and say that Southerners would have seceded and fought over it." However, Davis contrasted the motivations of the Confederate leadership with that of the motivations for individual men for fighting in the Confederate army, writing that "The widespread northern myth that the Confederates went to the battlefield to perpetuate slavery is just that, a myth. Their letters and diaries, in the tens of thousands, reveal again and again that they fought and died because their Southern homeland was invaded and their natural instinct was to protect home and hearth."

1990s Davis was awarded the Sonoma State University Distinguished Alumni Award in 1993. In 2015, he received The Lincoln Forum's Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement. He is a past president of the National Historical Society.

Davis earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts (History, 1969) degrees from Sonoma State University. For many years, he was editor and publisher of Civil War Times Illustrated and lived in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

William Charles "Jack" Davis (born 1946) is an American historian who was a professor of history at Virginia Tech and the former director of programs at that school's Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. Specializing in the American Civil War, Davis has written more than 40 books on that subject and other aspects of early southern U.S. history, such as the Texas Revolution. He is the only three-time winner of the Jefferson Davis Prize for Confederate history and was awarded the Jules and Frances Landry Award for Southern History. His book Lone Star Rising has been called "the best one-volume history of the Texas revolution yet written".