C vann woodward essays for scholarships

Comer Vann Woodward was arguably the twentieth century’s foremost Southern historian. Although published in the s, his Origins of the New South, – and The Strange Career of Jim Crow remain vital interpretive narratives.

C. Vann Woodward was born November 13, , to Hugh (Jack) and Emily (Bess) Woodward in Vanndale (Cross County). During Woodward’s youth, his father was a school administrator in Wynne (Cross County), then Arkadelphia (Clark County), and subsequently Morrilton (Conway County). Woodward graduated from high school in Morrilton in and enrolled at Henderson-Brown College, a small Methodist institution in Arkadelphia. After two years, he transferred to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, graduating in with an AB in philosophy. Inspired by his uncle and namesake, Comer Woodward, and a social philosophy honed during his undergraduate experience, Woodward emerged from college determined to combat racial and class injustice.

Woodward spent a year teaching English at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, then earned a master’s in political science at Columbia University in New York. Back in Atlanta in the fall of , after a summer touring Europe and the Soviet Union, Woodward became embroiled in a campaign to fund the defense of Angelo Herndon, an African Americancommunist arrested for publicly protesting the famous Scottsboro case, in which nine Black men were arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in the rapes of two white women; the defendants were convicted on the basis of flimsy evidence and were given inadequate counsel during their trial. His support of Herndon earned Woodward notoriety as a social rebel. It coincided with Depression-related financial retrenchment at Georgia Tech, bringing the termination of thirty faculty positions, including Woodward’s.

His livelihood derailed, Woodward moved in to Oxford, Georgia, where his father was the dean of Emory Junior College. Considering but quickly dism

With sharp analysis and engaging prose, these essays deftly illustrate the enduring power of Woodward’s ideas. Representing the fields of history, English, and political science, the authors use Woodward’s original essays to offer fresh insights into the enduring question of southern identity as well as contemporary political issues.”—Kari Frederickson, author of The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, –

More than fifty years after its initial publication, C. Vann Woodward’s landmark work, The Burden of Southern History, remains an essential text on the southern past. Today, a “southern burden” still exists, but its shape and impact on southerners and the world varies dramatically from the one envisioned by Woodward. Recasting Woodward’s ideas on the contemporary South, the contributors to The Ongoing Burden of Southern History highlight the relevance of his scholarship for the twenty-first-century reader and student.

This interdisciplinary retrospective tackles questions of equality, white southern identity, the political legacy of Reconstruction, the heritage of Populism, and the place of the South within the nation, along with many others. From Woodward’s essays on populism and irony, historians find new insight into the burgeoning Tea Party, while they also shed light on the contemporary legacy of the redeemer Democrats. Using up-to-date election data, scholars locate a “shrinking” southern identity and point to the accomplishments of the recent influx of African American voters and political candidates. This penetrating analysis reinterprets Woodward’s classic for a new generation of readers interested in the modern South.

Angie Maxwell is the Diane D. Blair Professor of Southern Studies and an assistant professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. Her research has appeared in The Southern Quarterly, Journal of Black Studies, and Presidential Studies Quarterly.

Todd Shields is a professor of political science

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