Dr. Larry Usilton would be a great warrior, if not a historian. An equally valiant endeavor, he has spent a nearly fifty-year career investigating the great warriors of history. Coming from a meager, white collar family, and being the first of his family to go to college, many parallels can be drawn between his origin story and many underdogs and heroes of Ancient History. However, it was a series of serendipitous events that brought Dr. Usilton to the history department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 1971. It all began his senior year of college, when he enrolled in a “problems in history” seminar. For the first time he was forced to engage with in-depth research through a terminal paper. The hard work of analysis and …show more content… Dr. Usilton received his Bachelors, Masters and terminal Doctorate degrees at Mississippi State University. Among other limiting factors, such as in-state/out of state tuition costs he elected to remain at the University. He was also drawn by two medieval and ancient historians imbedded in the department. Under the guidance of such mentors, he was established as a proficient Medievalist and an Ancient Historian. Under advisement of his mentors, in 1970 Dr. Usilton attended the Southern Historical Association in Louisville, Kentucky with the goal of finding work. After fielding other offers, Dr. Usilton was called by the head of the UNCW history department at the time for a breakfast meeting, and hired soon after. Upon his arrival in 1971, the history department was located in Alderman Hall and contained only seven or eight faculty members. Research is the synthesis and reason Dr. Usliton pursued the historical profession. The early years of his career were met with many research related problems, he did not have ready access to computers and the internet. Major research libraries like those of Duke University Show More
