Orville Vernon Burton is now in his second year as Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University. A Georgia native who grew up in Ninety Six, S.C., Burton was associated for more than 30 years with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar and professor of history, African American studies and sociology.

Burton is one of the foremost Lincoln scholars in America today. His 2007 book The Age of Lincoln was widely acclaimed for its scope and originality, and his latest work, The Essential Lincoln, is a collection of 30 quintessential Lincoln writings. He is also an expert on slavery, civil rights and the application of computing in the social sciences and humanities. In addition to his scholarship, Burton also has an outstanding reputation as a teacher. He received the American Historical Association's Eugene Asher Distinguished Teacher Award for 2003. A graduate of Furman University, he earned a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University.

The Burroughs Distinguished Chair in Southern History and Culture was Coastal Carolina University's first faculty chair, created in 1988 to stimulate study of the history of the Waccamaw region. In a recent conversation with Coastal Carolina University Magazine, Burton shared some of his thoughts on his new position, on Lincoln, and on some of his other heroes.

How does it feel to be back in South Carolina after 34 years in Illinois?

It's been longer than that, actually. I left Ninety Six, my hometown, and went to Furman, which was in South Carolina but in many ways was like a different world. From there I went to Princeton, then briefly into the Army, and on to Illinois. It's great to be back. I love the state, and I love the state's history. But it feels rather strange: for 34 years I was a scholar on the American South living in Illinois, and now I'm a Lincoln scholar living in South Carolina!

For most of your career you were associated with a very large school. What is teaching at Coastal Carolina University like in comparison?

At Illinois in my American history course, I had 750 students in one classroom. Here it's very different. You get to interact with the students more, which is important, because part of a professor's job is mentoring. Students can learn by observing how faculty deal with problems, even beyond the classroom. It's the kind of thing that I experienced when I was an undergraduate at Furman, which made all the difference to me. Neither my mom nor dad finished high school, so I have a lot of empathy for first generation college students who are coming to Coastal. I've been really impressed with them.

This is the year of Lincoln's bicentennial. Your last two books are about him. When did your professional interest in Lincoln begin?

When I was a child in Ninety Six we had a bookmobile that came to school every two weeks. By the time I was 12, I had read every book in it, and there were two people I had picked out as heroes. One was Abraham Lincoln and the other was Jesse James. I think what drew me to these very dissimilar men was a sort of mythology that connected them in my young mind. Both were supposed to have loved their mothers, which appealed to me because I was very close to my mother, my father having died when I was seven. They also were both defined in the popular imagination as men who helped poor people. It was certainly true of Lincoln—of Jesse James not so much. He was pretty much just a Confederate who didn't give up, viciously racist, and a killer.

Did your view of Lincoln change in the process of studying about him?

Usually the more you get to know people, as a historian, the more you see their foibles, their faults, their demons, your estimation of them goes down. With Lincoln it was just the opposite. The better I knew him, the more I appreciated him and—I don't use the word loosely—came to love him: what he stood for and how he dealt with life and with adversity. It was amazing how he did not hold grudges. He was willing to work with those who disagreed with him; he always tried to get the best person for the job. He had the highest ideals, and he struggled to achieve them. He didn't always make it, but he tried. True heroism is found in those who struggle against great odds.

The current president is also from Illinois. Everyone has described Obama's election as "historic." As a historian of race in America, how did you feel when Obama was inaugurated?

It's certainly extraordinarily historic. I'm not sure I thought I would ever live to see it. But whether it becomes one of those transformative elections that changes the political landscape, we're going to have to wait and see. Two presidents with Illinois backgrounds did have transformative administrations: Lincoln and Reagan, who was born in Tampico, Ill. But it's certainly an exciting time for someone who's studied race relations all his life to have an African American elected president. There was a study recently that measured verbal skills of white and black youth before and after Obama was elected, and the numbers shot up for black students. Role models are important—people see an educated, articulate African American who loves America and who wants to bring out those "better angels" in our nature as Lincoln did. There are a lot of similarities between them. When I was invited back to Illinois this year to give the Chancellor's lecture, I titled it "Lincoln in the Age of Obama."

You are also known for your work in applying the computer analysis to historical research. What led you to this specialization?

Initially I was more interested in studying "ordinary folks" than great historical figures. My generation of social historians, coming of age in the Vietnam war, perhaps did not believe in heroes anymore, but were very interested in the lives of plain people. And their story was hidden in the records of the United States census returns. Every decade a census was held to determine representation for Congress, but it also included wonderful information on wealth and genealogy and agriculture and other things that you could quantify. The computer gives you access to a vast amount of this data. You can chart the progress of a family from tenant farming to becoming landowners. I founded the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science at Illinois and one of the things it is doing now is digitizing every known letter that Lincoln wrote and received. Students can trace, for example, how frequently he used the word "liberty" or when he first used the word "emancipation." You can find out where ideas come from and map them. It's very exciting. My argument is that if we, the academic community, do not shape the use of this cutting edge pedagogy and research, then it's going to be done by businesses whose main interest is in making money as opposed to how students learn in a digital environment.

What is your relationship with Charles Joyner, your predecessor in the Burroughs Chair?

I try to make sure I see Chaz every week. He's the main reason I was interested in Coastal. He really made this a distinguished position—he shaped it in a way that gave it distinction and I'd like to try to do the same. I don't think anyone can replace Charles Joyner, but I'd like to honor the tradition he founded through this chair. We were introduced to each other about 30 years ago by Drew Faust, a historian of the South who is now president of Harvard University. Chaz is one of my heroes—he really represents the best in the profession.