W. Fitzhugh Brundage

William Fitzhugh Brundage is an American historian and the William Umstead Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina. His works focus on white and black historical memory in the American South since the Civil War.

Early life Brundage graduated from the University of Chicago with an MA in 1984, and from Harvard University with an MA and Ph.D. in 1988.

Career Brundage taught at Queen's University at Kingston, and University of Florida.

He is a Guggenheim Fellow.

His 2026 book A Fate Worse than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War describes the usage of prison camps for captured enemy soldiers during the American Civil War. It has been described as the first comprehensive study of those prison camps since William B. Hesseltine's 1930 book Civil War Prisons.

In A Fate Worse than Hell, Brundage writes that prisoners of war were incarcerated at unprecedented rates, made possible by technological advancements such as railroads. The Union and Confederacy both did little to provide for the welfare of their prisoners, he argues, but the Confederacy was substantially more neglectful, and their death rates were higher: 16% for Union soldiers in Confederate camps versus 12% for Confederate soldiers in Union camps.

Works

Introduction to Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era, Louisiana State University Press, 2017