Ellis Merton Coulter (1890–1981) was an American historian of the South, author, and a founding member of the Southern Historical Association. For four decades, he was a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, where he was chair of the History Department for 18 years. He was editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly for 50 years, and published 26 books on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

By the late 20th century, historians were generally describing Coulter's body of work as "historical apologies justifying Southern secession, defending the Confederate cause, and condemning Reconstruction." As historian Eric Foner notes:

Anti-Reconstruction scholars faithfully echoed Democratic propaganda of the post-Civil War years. E. Merton Coulter wrote in 1947, "The Negroes were fearfully unprepared to occupy positions of rulership," and black officeholding was "the most spectacular and exotic development in government in the history of white civilization...(and the) longest to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated."

Foner also wrote that as late as 1968, Coulter was "the last wholly antagonistic scholar of the era, describing Georgia's most prominent Reconstruction black officials as swindlers and 'scamps' and suggesting that whatever positive qualities they possessed were inherited from white ancestors."