Orville Vernon Burton is professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books include "A Gentleman and an Officer" A Military and Social History of James B. Griffin's Civil War.

Burton traces the evolution of Edgefield County from the antebellum period through Reconstruction and beyond. From amassed information on every household in this large rural community, he tests the many generalizations about southern black and white families of this period and finds that they were strikingly similar. Wealth, rather than race or class, was the main factor that influenced family structure, and the matriarchal family was but a myth.