William Robert Billups

Robert Billups is a US historian who specializes in twentieth-century US political history. He primarily researches racial and political violence after World War II.

His first book project, American Terror, provides a new chapter in the long history of US political violence. Using digital tools and documents from dozens of archives, Robert analyzes over one thousand arsons and bombings directed against US civil rights activists and their allies between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s. Anti–civil rights terrorism, though concentrated in the US South, was a national phenomenon with international dimensions. During the postwar era, some far-right extremists in Europe, South Africa, and South America studied and incorporated the terror tactics used by radical US segregationists—who sometimes found inspiration from white militants overseas. Robert argues that most racial arsonists and bombers understood themselves as political actors who turned to violence to suppress specific civil rights advances and to pressure officeholders. Efforts by legislators and law enforcement to combat those anti–civil rights terrorists, in turn, contributed to the federalization of US policing and the rise of far-right hostility toward the federal state.

Robert has published peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of American History and the Journal of Southern History, as well as public-facing scholarship in the Washington Post. He is also the creator of “Dynamiting Houses of God,” a digital project that depicts mid-twentieth-century white supremacist violence against US houses of worship.

Robert previously researched and taught on the University of Florida's history faculty. He is grateful to the Ambrose Monell Foundation, Baylor University’s Texas Collection and Wardlaw Fellowship Fund, the Bentley Historical Library, Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, the Everett Dirksen Congressional Center, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the LBJ and Moody Foundations, the Southern Baptist Historical Library & Archives, the University of Alabama’s Frances J. Summersell Center for the Study of the South, the University of North Texas Libraries, the University of Oklahoma’s Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center, the University of Florida's Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund, and Emory University’s Bill & Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Center for Digital Scholarship, and Tam Institute for Jewish Studies for supporting his scholarly agenda.