He makes American history accessible to any audience, young or old. His lectures wrap the stories of social history around the structure of political history. Integrating and balancing these two approaches, he focuses on the most important issues of his subject in a way that audiences appreciate and enjoy. Whether talking about why the Confederacy lost, the critical role of historian as detective or racial boundaries in America, Professor Roark entrances.

He received his B.A. from the University of California, Davis (1963) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (1973). His dissertation won the Allan Nevins Prize. He has taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, the University of Nairobi, Kenya, the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and since 1983 at Emory University, where he is now Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History. In 2001-2002, he was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, England. In 1993, he received the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award. He has written Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction. With Michael P. Johnson, he is author of Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. Roark has also co-authored with five other historians a superbly written textbook titled The American Promise: A History of the United States, which was released in the summer of 1997.

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