Short answers, pulled from the story.
E. Merton Coulter was an American historian born in Catawba, North Carolina on the 20th of July 1890. He spent six decades as a professor at the University of Georgia and served as the first president of the Southern Historical Association in 1934. He died in 1981.
In The South During Reconstruction (1947), Coulter wrote that "The Negroes were fearfully unprepared to occupy positions of rulership" and described black officeholding as "the most spectacular and exotic development in government in the history of white civilization." By the late twentieth century, historians described his body of work as "historical apologies justifying Southern secession, defending the Confederate cause, and condemning Reconstruction."
Coulter's scholarship consistently defended the Confederate cause and condemned Reconstruction-era black political participation. Historian Eric Foner described him, as late as 1968, as "the last wholly antagonistic scholar of the era," and documented that his arguments were used in the mid-twentieth century to justify maintaining Jim Crow segregation and opposing civil rights reform.
Coulter was a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens for six decades, serving as chair of its History Department for eighteen years starting in 1940. Before that appointment, he taught briefly at Marietta College in Ohio.
The Library of Congress lists fifty books written or edited by E. Merton Coulter, and he published more than 125 articles. His works ranged from Reconstruction history to biographies of Georgia figures and accounts of forgotten Georgia communities such as Auraria and Petersburg.
Coulter's outlook was shaped significantly by his mentor at the University of North Carolina, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, who argued that Southern whites had suffered under Reconstruction and that freedmen lacked readiness for suffrage. In 1914, Coulter also studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under professors who held similar views.