C. Vann Woodward
From Wikinfo
Comer Vann Woodward (13 November 1908 - 17 December 1999) was a preeminent American historian focusing primarily on the American South and race relations.
C. Vann Woodward was born in Vanndale, a town named after his mother's aristocratic family, in Cross County, Arkansas on 13 November 1908. Woodward attended high school in Morrilton, Arkansas.
He attended Henderson-Brown College in Arkadelphia, Arkansas for two years. He transferred to Emory University in 1930 where he graduated. He received a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina.
Woodward took graduate courses at Columbia University in 1931 where he met, and was influenced by, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance movement. In 1932 he worked for the defense of Angelo Hernandez, a young Communist Party member who had been accused of subversive activities.
Woodward taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1946 to 1961 and at Yale from 1961 to 1967.
In 1974 Woodward led a committee of 14 historians who produced a 400 page document on the historical reponses of U.S. Presidents to charges of misconduct for the House Judiciary Committee as part of the hearings surrounding the Watergate Scandal.
Woodward won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for Mary Chestnut�s Civil War. He won the Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. Martin Luther King, Jr. called The Strange Career of Jim Crow "the historical bible of the civil rights movement."
In 1998 Woodward co-sponsored a statement by 400 historians opposing the attempted impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
C. Vann Woodward died in Hamden, Connecticut on 17 December 1999.
The Southern Historical Association has established the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize awarded annually to the best dissertation on southern history.
Some Works by C. Vann Woodward
- Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel (1938)
- Origins of the New South, 1877�1913 (1951)
- Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (1951)
- The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955)
- The Burden of Southern History (1960)
- The Battle of Leyte Gulf (1965)
- American Counterpoint (1971)
- Mary Chestnut�s Civil War (1981) editor
- The Oxford History of the United States (1982�99)
- The Private Mary Chestnut (1984)
Compare
- The Wikipedia article, "C. Vann Woodward" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Vann_Woodward December 18, 2003
