Terrill is a pioneer in the field of African-American studies and taught the first course in African-American history in 1968 at USC or at any previously all-white public university in the South. He came to USC in 1966, having earned a bachelor's degree from Westminster College in Fulton, Mo.; a master's degree in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary; and master's and doctoral degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He helped establish the African American Studies Program in 1971 at USC, where he taught until his retirement in 2000.

The Thomas Terrill Scholarship, which will begin in Fall 2006, is a research-based scholarship. Awarded to a graduate or undergraduate student in the African American Studies Program, the scholarship will be used to conduct research in that field. The scholarship is an endowment collaborative between USC's Department of History and the African-American Studies Program.

Terrill's primary areas of research and teaching have been the American South, the Gilded Age, and progressivism and American labor history. His books include The American South: A History, Such As Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties, and The American South Comes of Age, a look at Southern history since 1930. He has worked as a principal historian with leading filmmakers and also co-produced a televised college course on the recent South. He has earned fellowships with the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation and was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Genoa, Italy, in 1990.

For more information on USC's African American Studies Program, go to www.cas.sc.edu/afra/.

For more information about or to contribute to the Thomas Terrill Scholarship, call 7-7042.

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