Dr. Philip Racine, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History Emeritus, was awarded the 2025 Governor’s Award in the Humanities by South Carolina Humanities.
“I’m glad to have been awarded the honor, and I really owe it to what Wofford did for me,” Racine says. “This is the only place I’ve ever taught, and the history department was so strong and the college was so helpful in supporting my research.”
The Governor’s Awards were established in 1991 to recognize outstanding achievement in humanities research, teaching and scholarship; institutional and individual participation in helping communities in South Carolina better understand our cultural heritage or ideas and issues related to the humanities; excellence in defining South Carolina’s cultural life to the nation or world; and exemplary support for public humanities programs.
Racine taught history for 40 years at Wofford and was a long-time chair of the history department. He coordinated the Lewis P. Jones Visiting Professorship, which continues to bring influential historians — including a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Guggenheim Fellow and a president of the American Historical Association — to campus to teach and deliver public lectures.
Racine was born in Maine and received his bachelor’s degree from Bowdoin College. He initially pursued English as a career path, but a cache of letters he studied from a Bowdoin graduate to his father during the Civil War fostered a passion for Southern history.
In 1969, shortly after receiving his master’s from Emory University, Racine joined Wofford’s faculty in the Department of History and remained with the college until his retirement in 2009.
“I started out wanting to be a secondary school teacher, and I changed to become a college professor because I enjoyed researching and writing history,” Racine says. “I did this job because I loved it, and Wofford rewarded me for all these years.”
Much of Racine’s research has centered on the Civil War and common, working-class people in the South. Among his most widely read publications include “Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris,” which relays the writings of an Upstate farmer and his wife after he decides to enlist during the Civil War, and “Seeing Spartanburg: A History in Images,” which remains Hub City Writers Project’s best-selling title according to its site.
“I loved research and teaching students how to research history,” Racine says. “It’s like being a detective in a sense. You want to know how this happened, when it happened, why it happened. And instead of just having somebody tell you, you go out and find it by yourself.”