Chase C. Mooney

Chase Curran Mooney was a Guggenheim Fellowship and Rosenwald Fund Fellowship-winning American historian. He specialized in the history of the 19th-century United States.

Biography

Born into a family of teachers, he attended Vanderbilt University from undergrad through his Ph.D. During the window between 1939 and 1945, he worked for a time alongside Harriett Owsley and Blanche Henry Clark on what were known as the Owsley charts, "a composite of Schedules I, H, and IV of the unpublished Federal Census for Tennessee, 1850 and 1860." Mooney served in the U.S. Army during World War II, working as a senior historian.
His 1957 Slavery in Tennessee was praised at the time of publication as the most complete and definitive work on the topic to that time; the book was reprinted by Negro Universities Press in 1971. He was an associate editor of the Journal of American History from 1963 to 1966.
Mooney's posthumously published biography of William H. Crawford was described as "more than just another rehash of a life...It is consummately a biography of one of Georgia's great men...it is a fine example of historiography brilliantly and sparsely written. Third, it is a source work about a little-known man caught up in commonly known times and places." A native of Tennessee, Mooney taught at Indiana University for most of his career.