[1] He was a professor at Longwood College in Virginia, Simkins was a leading progressive in the 1920s and 1930s regarding race relations but became a defender of segregation in the 1950s and 1960s.

Simkins also taught at Louisiana State University, where he was a mentor of Charles P. Roland, another historian of the South and the Civil War.

In South Carolina During Reconstruction (with Robert Hilliard Woody) (1931) he broke with the Dunning School and gave a well-balanced history.

[7] Howard K. Beale praised it: "With refreshing freedom from prejudice and special pleading, the authors picture honest, unselfish carpetbaggers, respectable, well-meaning scalawags, and Negroes with intelligence and political ability.

A colorful if eccentric professor at Longwood College in Virginia, Simpkins was a leading progressive in the 1920s and 1930s regarding race relations, but became more conservative in the 1950s and 1960s, in part because his wife taught nearby in the Prince Edward County, Virginia public schools, which became a companion case to Brown v. Board of Education and thus a touchpoint of Massive Resistance.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank published excerpts and summed up the book as "[h]istorically wrong and morally bankrupt — but for tender White minds, discomfort-free.