Jack Temple Kirby, a historian who decried stereotypes of the American South and traced the ways its people and landscapes have shaped one another, died Aug. 6 in St. Augustine, Fla. He was 70. The cause was heart failure, said Constance Pierce, his companion. Kirby, whose roots in the South reach back to the 1600s, was a professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, from 1965 until 2002, when he retired and moved to St. Augustine. Pierce was a professor of English at Miami University. In 2007, Kirby was one of two recipients of the Bancroft Prize, which is awarded annually by Columbia University to the authors of books 'of exceptional merit' in American history, biography and diplomacy. The Bancroft jurors cited Kirby's 2006 book, 'Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South' (North Carolina University Press), a passionate recounting of the history of human settlement. It discusses how the land sustained and shaped people's lives but also how humans damaged the land. Calling the book 'elegantly conceived and beautifully written,' the jurors said that 'although 'Mockingbird Song' is set in the South, it is about more than the South.' 'Kirby reflects profoundly on the relationships of Americans -- and of humankind -- to the natural world,' the jurors said. Kirby, who in recent years was president of the Southern Historical Association, edited or wrote seven books. Before 'Mockingbird Song,' he was best known for 'Media-Made Dixie' (Louisiana State University Press, 1978), which traced the South's role in the nation's imagination. In movies, for example, he said, the South has been trapped by cliches of racists, graceful landed gentry, poverty, homespun rural values, stock-car racers and moonshiners. 'We need some new tropes,' Kirby told The New York Times in 1997. 'I think what we're doing is making Northern white folks feel good about themselves by telling the same story over and over again about the South.' Born in Portsmouth, Va., on Aug. 22, 1938, Jack Temple Kirby was one of three children of Clifford and Theodosia Palmer Kirby. His father was a machinist on the docks in Norfolk, Va. Besides Pierce, his companion of 17 years, Kirby is survived by a son, Matthew, of Manhattan; a daughter, Valerie Kirby of Fort Wayne, Ind.; two sisters, Susan Kirby of Portsmouth, Va., and Betsy Andrews of Midlothian, Va., and two grandchildren. His marriage to the former Ann Bulleit ended in divorce. Kirby received his bachelor's degree in history from Old Dominion University, then his master's degree and his doctorate from the University of Virginia, all in history. He was steeped in Southern history, Pierce said. One of his distant great-grandfathers (she could not say how many greats) was Thomas Kirby, a mill mechanic who arrived from England in 1634 and prospered as a farmer in Virginia. Other distant relatives became militia captains in the Revolutionary War; still others fought in the War of 1812 and in the Civil War, for the Confederacy. 