“For the last 40 years, I have been carrying a book around in my head — and I realized that’s not a burden, it’s kind of a gift.”
—Edward L. Ayers, president emeritus, the University of Richmond
In a life that continues to be marked by leadership, accolades and influence, Ed Ayers — the son of a Tennessee used-car salesman and a fifth-grade teacher — says that when his feet hit the floor every morning, his mind is usually turned toward the book he’s currently writing or the one he’s going to write next.
“I don’t belong to any school of anything. I don’t feel I’m carrying a flag for any cause. I just kind of have a desire to write a history in which everybody has a place. My dream is to connect with as broad an audience as I can, with different people. It’s what I do most uniquely,” says Ayers, one of the nation’s best known historians of the American South.
When he left the presidency of UR in 2015, Ayers made a rapid beeline to a rural property near Charlottesville that he and his wife, Abby, have owned since 1986. In recent years, it has served as a retreat.
The couple has a permanent home in Richmond’s Museum District, but the Albemarle place affords Ayers the privacy he needs to write and to reconnect with nature — “a place to go to Weed Eat, chainsaw and mow the yard,” as he says.
Three years after ending his tenure as UR's president, Ed Ayers continues to deepen our understanding of American history through his writing and multimedia projects. (Photo courtesy Ed Ayers)
He now juggles his writing between teaching classes at UR, serving as chairman of the board of The American Civil War Museum in Richmond and holding the presidency of the Organization of American Historians, representing more than 7,800 historians working in the U.S. and abroad.
Ayers also serves on the Monument Avenue Commission, tasked with advising Richmond on what to do with its Confederate statutes. (The commission expects to make a recommendation this month, after holding a public meeting on May 19 to review community input and receive additional comments, and a work session later the same day.) He sees the discussion Richmond is having about its monuments as a positive sign. "It has been heartening to watch the conversation evolve as people come to understand the perspectives of their fellow Richmonders," he says, adding that the city will be better as a result of this willingness to listen.
His latest book since he left the UR presidency has won critical praise. In April, Ayers received the Lincoln Prize and a $50,000 cash award for “The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America.” The Kirkus Review, a professional book review site, describes it as “an exemplary contribution to the history of the Civil War and its aftermath.”
The book is part of a two-volume history focusing on two communities, Virginia’s Augusta County and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and the people and purposes that bound them to different causes during the Civil War.
The first volume in the series, “In the Presence of Mine Enemies,” was published while he was dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. It won both the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history and the Beveridge Prize for the best book in English on the history of the Americas since 1492.
Then Ayers went into a deep freeze on writing as fundraising and administrative duties beckoned at U.Va., and then it was more of the same as he served as president of the University of Richmond, a job that consumed nearly every moment of his free time.
When he was younger, Ayers wanted to follow in the footsteps of Tom Wolfe, the Richmond-born author who has written best-selling books and helped launch a new form of journalism that employs literary techniques.
But then he fell in love with the idea of an academic life. He finished his undergraduate work at the University of Tennessee in three years, spent a year as a social worker, got married — and won a scholarship to Yale University.
He recalls the short conversation he had with his mother, Billie Lou Ayers, about his good luck with Yale.
“I told her I was going into history in graduate school, and she said, ‘What for, honey? We already know what happened.’ ”
Ayers loved his mother dearly — she died earlier this year at age 85, and was “spunky to the end,” he says — but he asserts that her theory about history was absolutely wrong. He has devoted most of his academic life to proving that contrary to his mother’s belief, history is always changing.
But only if the right person asks the right questions — and is willing to endure the long slog through records, personal and public, that original research demands.
While at U.Va., Ayers was a pioneer in the area of digital history. He collected manuscripts, diaries, maps, census records, newspapers and other historical sources related to the counties he would write about in his two-volume history and transformed them into digital files, which were then incorporated into the “Valley of the Shadow” website.
The internet was still in its infancy then, and harnessing technology for historical research was an exciting new tool.
When Ayers’ tenure as UR’s president ended three years ago, the university acted quickly to keep him in the family.
“When I was stepping down as president, they said, ‘You know, we’d like you to stay a part of the university, and we’d like you to do what you really like to do — innovating American history,’ ” Ayers recalls.
So instead of naming a road or a building after him, donors and influential members of the UR community created the “New American History” endowment as a tribute to Ayers’ service to the university.
“They put in money to help try to advance the place of American history in American culture,” he says.
For his next book, “Southern Journey — Two Centuries of Migration and Movement in the American South,” Ayers is using digital maps — the first to track this migration — produced by the Digital Scholarship Lab at UR.
Bunkhistory.org is another innovative experiment with history pioneered by Ayers. The site defines itself as “a shared home for the Web’s most interesting writing and thinking about the American past.”
One recent contribution looked at how American teenagers have helped change American history and the course of the nation.
Besides all his other interests, Ayers is co-host of the "BackStory with the American History Guys,” a nationally syndicated podcast that looks at the history behind today’s headlines.
“BackStory” is up to 400,000 downloads a month,” he remarks.
Ayers says that intersecting with everything that interests him, and keeping a busy and demanding calendar along with professional and civic obligations, has been a deliberate choice, as he has reflected on what’s behind him and what’s ahead.
“I’m 65,” he says, “and I hang out with people my age, and it’s like it was when we were back in our 20s: ‘Where do you want to live, what do you want to do?’ Except, we die at the end of it.”
The Monument Avenue Commission public meeting on May 19 will take place at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., followed that evening by a work session in Council Chambers at City Hall, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. The public can attend the latter session but will not be allowed to comment.
