Walter Lynwood Fleming (1874-1932) was an American historian, born on a farm at Brundidge, Ala., April 8, 1874, the son of William LeRoy and Mary Love (Edwards) Fleming. His parents on both sides were Georgians who migrated to Alabama in the ante-bellum period. His father, a well-to-do planter and slave owner, served in the Civil War as a cavalryman. He was not politically prominent during Reconstruction. Fleming attended Alabama Polytechnic Institute, taking the B.S. degree, with honors, in 1896, and the M.S. degree in 1897. He taught in the public schools of Alabama in 1894-1896 and became an instructor in history and English at his alma mater in 1896-1897. He was assistant librarian 1897-1898 and an instructor in English 1899-1900. In 1898 Fleming enlisted in the Second Alabama Volunteers in as a private; was promoted to lieutenant, and fought in the Spanish-American War. He began graduate work in history at Columbia University in New York in 1900, taking the PhD in 1904. He was influenced especially by Professor George Petrie of Alabama Polytechnic Institute and Professor William Archibald Dunning of Columbia. From 1903 to 1907 he taught history at West Virginia University, and from 1907 to 1917, at Louisiana State University. In 1917, he was called to a chair in history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was a highly effective teacher of undergraduates and graduate students, mentoring numerous PhD's, who in turn created history programs at colleges across the South. He became Dean of the Vanderbilt College of Arts and Sciences in 1923 and later Director of the Graduate School. Fleming was close to the Nashville Agrarians who dedicated to him their influential manifesto I'll Take My Stand (1930). [Green 1936] Woodrow Wilson while president of Princeton University offered him a professorship, which Fleming declined.