The use of prescribed fire in the South has a long and storied history. From earliest times fire has had a place on the southern landscape defining and redefining plant community and thus wildlife community boundaries. Before human settlement, lightning fires forged the landscape and brought to prominent expression various genetic characters in a host of plant species that we now call fire adaptations. Early aboriginal peoples arriving on the continent concomitant with the last ice age began using fire extensively as a tool. The lightning fire regime was modified and extended in a variety of ways over several thousand years through extensive aboriginal use of fire. The result was the extensive southern pine woodlands and savannas, oak savannas in places, and expanses of prairie in others. The various landscapes early European settlers found across the continent and especially in the South were a result of anthropogenic and other forms of disturbance.Early European settlers adapted aboriginal burning patterns and often brought their own burning culture. Initial opposition to the use of fire in the South for vegetation management came from European influenced foresters in response to a number of large landscape level fires, in part related to wide scale indiscriminate logging and the associated slash. Even prominent plant ecologists such as Weaver and Clements overlooked the influence of fire in defining plant community succession pathways and trajectories. However fire was imbedded in the culture of many parts of the South. Woods burning persisted as a behavioral aspect of a subculture in the face of population growth, development and ensuing land use change despite aggressive government sponsored campaigns to the contrary. The hunting plantation culture of the South also had a marked influence on keeping prescribed fire on the landscape.Tall Timbers Research Station (established 1958) was instrumental in providing a forum, through its Fire Ecology Conferences, that encouraged scientific research about fire. These conferences began in 1962 and as they continued the science of fire ecology became a reality. Today science has informed us of the value and indeed the essential role of fire in maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem health. Fire Ecology has emerged as a prominent science and the literature on fire and the quest for information about fire is at an all time high. The science available has grown at an exponential rate in the last 2 decades. Public understanding however has lagged significantly behind.