C. Vann Woodward

Examines how viewpoints have changed on the history of the south and explains the reasons for a reinterpretation of Southern history.

"C. Vann Woodward's The Burden of Southern History remains one of the essential history texts of our time. In it Woodward brilliantly addresses the interrelated themes of southern identity, southern published in 1960, the book quickly became a touchstone for generations of students. The third edition contains a chapter, "Look Away, Look Away," in which Woodward finds a plethora of additional ironies in the South's experience. It also includes previously uncollected appreciations of Robert Penn Warren, to whom the book was originally dedicated, and William Faulkner. This updated third edition also features a new foreword by historian William E. Leuchtenburg in which he recounts the events that led up to Woodward's writing The Burden of Southern History, and reflects on the book's?and Woodward's--place in the study of southern history. The Burden of Southern History is quintessential Woodward--wise, witty, ruminative, daring, and as alive in the twenty-first century as when it was written"--Page 4 of cover.

For review see: K. van Berkel, in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, jrg. 106, no. 3 (1993); p. 449.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward convincingly shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact, during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative newcomer to the region. Hailed as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century, The Strange Career of Jim Crow has sold almost a million copies and remains, in the words of David Herbert Donald, "a landmark in the history of American race relations."

"Biographical study of the Georgia agitator, born of a slave-owning family reduced to poverty after the Civil war, when his family declined from the plantation owner class to the share-cropper status. Always an enemy of industrialism, Watson took the side of the southern farmer. He was elected to Congress in 1890, later became a Populist leader, and in 1904 and 1908 he ran for president on the Populist ticket." Book rev. digest.

C. Vann Woodward, one of the great lights of southern history, reflects on race relations in the American South, his own experiences there, and some of the contributions historians have made to the field. Unfortunately, the interviewer spends more time sharing his opinions than drawing out Woodward's, and Woodward's age at the time of the interview (he was 82) may have affected its quality.

A study undertaken for the Impeachment Inquiry Staff of the House Committee on the Judiciary, with an added introd.