BALTIMORE — Bertram Wyatt-Brown, an American history professor who wrote widely on Southern history and culture and whose book on honor in the antebellum South was a 1983 Pulitzer Prize finalist, died Nov. 5 of pulmonary fibrosis in Baltimore. He was 80.
Wyatt-Brown studied at Johns Hopkins University under C. Vann Woodward, considered one of the most important scholars of the American South and race relations.
After earning his doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1963, Wyatt-Brown began a teaching career, with positions at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland from 1966 to 1983 and the University of Florida from 1983 to 2004. He then returned to Johns Hopkins as a visiting fellow.
His study of the role of honor in all classes of society in the antebellum South resulted in his critically acclaimed book “Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South," published in 1982 by Oxford University Press.
