Instructor: Dr. William Piston

Welcome from Dr. Piston (00:42)
Transcript of welcome
(Get plug-in for Real Player)

William Garrett Piston is a native of Johnson City, Tennessee. He received his
B. A. and M. A. degrees from Vanderbilt University and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. In 1988 he joined the Department of History at Missouri State University, in Springfield, Missouri. He serves as the department’s director of graduate studies, and specializes in American military history and the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Piston’s scholarship has won awards from the Center for Studies in Military History, the State Historical Society of Missouri, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Colonial Dames of America, and Missouri State University. The author or co-author of two books, twenty-one articles, and two booklets, he is best known for his 1987 work Lee’s Tarnished Lieutenant: James Longstreet and His Place in Southern History, a revisionist history of a controversial Confederate general. He was a member of the honorary board of directors for the Longstreet Memorial Fund, which in 1998 placed an equestrian statue of Longstreet at the Gettysburg National Battlefield. He serves on the board of directors for The Longstreet Society, which is working to establish a Longstreet museum in Gainesville, Georgia.

Piston’s most recent work is Wilson’s Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It (co-authored with Richard Hatcher), published in March 2000. In addition to providing a detailed narrative of the campaign and battle that largely determined the fate of Missouri, Wilson’s Creek blends military and social history by revealing the manner in which early war volunteers were motivated and sustained by a desire to uphold the reputations of their home towns. Ed Bearss, emeritus chief historian for the National Park Service, has written: “Piston and Hatcher have authored a tour de force. Wilson’s Creek establishes a standard for excellence against which future books of this character will be measured.” The State Historical Society of Missouri recognized Piston with its Missouri History Book Award in 2001 for Wilson’s Creek.

Piston is an associate editor for North & South magazine and is active in a variety of local and national organizations, including the Society for Military History, the Society of Civil War Historians, the Southern Historical Association, the Greene County Historical Society, and the Civil War Round Table of the Ozarks.