C. Vann Woodward

Comer Vann Woodward (born November 13, 1908 in Vanndale , Cross County , Arkansas , † December 17, 1999 in Hamden , Connecticut ) was an American historian .

Life

Woodward grew up in Arkansas, where his father was headmaster, and studied at Emory University with a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1930 and from Columbia University in 1931 with a master's degree in political science in 1932. At that time he belonged to the left political spectrum and the early civil rights movement, was in contact with leading African-American representatives of the Harlem Renaissance ( WEB Du Bois , about whom he wanted to write, Langston Hughes ). In 1932 he visited Germany and the Soviet Union and was also active in the campaign for the defense of the Afro-American trade unionist and communist political activist Angelo Herndon , who was convicted of rioting in Georgia under old laws from the Reconstruction era in 1932 because he had communist pamphlets found and organized a demonstration. In 1933 he was involved in a sociological study of the rural population in Georgia on behalf of the Works Progress Administration and their poor living conditions were a motive for him to turn to the study of the history of the southern states and their social and economic decline.

In 1937 Woodward received his doctorate from the University of North Carolina under Howard K. Beale on Thomas E. Watson . The publication established his reputation as a historian. He taught at the University of Florida and was to write the volume for the years 1877 to 1913 of the History of the South , which was published only in 1951 after the war (Origins of the South). During the Second World War he was a historian in the US Navy , which after the war became his book about the sea ​​and air battles in the Gulf of Leyte . From 1946 he taught at Johns Hopkins University and from 1961 at Yale University . In 1977 he retired.

Woodward wrote his dissertation on the populist politician Thomas E. Watson (1856-1922), a member of the House of Representatives and later the Senate , who was active in the populist party for the interests of poor farmers in the 1890s, but reactionary traits after the turn of the century (advocacy of black lynching, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism). Woodward saw it as an expression of the failure of the populist reformers in the south. He pursued the issue of race politics in the USA further with a monograph on the Jim Crow laws ( The Strange Career of Jim Crow , 1955), in which he showed in particular that these arose relatively late in time and with the defeat of the Land reform movement in the south in the 1890s. The book had a major impact on the civil rights movement of the 1960s and was named the historical bible of the civil rights movement by Martin Luther King in 1965 . During the 1960s, however, he turned away from the civil rights movement and turned to more conservative currents.

He became known for his portrayal of the development of the South after the Civil War in the Reconstruction era, especially for his book Origins of the New South from 1951, also for literary qualities. He belonged to a school of US historians around Charles A. Beard and his doctoral supervisor Howard K. Beale, which instead of ideological economic aspects came to the fore. In the Reconstruction era, according to Woodward, it was above all the contrasts between landowners, industrial and commercial interests and the poorer rural population. In the same year he published his analysis of the rise to power of the Hayes cabinet after controversial elections ( compromise of 1877 ), which also highlighted economic aspects.

Woodward was editor of the Oxford History of the United States (1982-1999). In 1958 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , 1959 to the American Philosophical Society, and 1970 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters . Since 1972 he has been a corresponding member of the British Academy . In 1969 he was president of the American Historical Association . In 1974 he was a historian's commission, which, on behalf of the Justice Committee of the US House of Representatives, wrote a report on misconduct by previous US presidents .

In 1982 he received the Pulitzer Prize for editing Mary Chesnut's Civil War Diaries . In 1986 his autobiography was published.

He was married to Glenn Boyd McLeod since 1937.

Fonts

• Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel , 1938, Oxford UP 1963, Archives .
• The Battle of Leyte Gulf , Macmillan 1947, 1965
• Origins of the New South , 1877-1913, Louisiana State UP 1951, 1971
• Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction , Boston: Little Brown 1951, 1991.
• The Strange Career of Jim Crow , Oxford UP 1955, 3rd edition 1974
• The Burden of Southern History , Louisiana State University Press 1955, 3rd edition 1993 (essays)
• Editor The Comparative Approach to American History , Basic Books 1968
• American Counterpoint: slavery and racism in the North-South dialogue , Boston: Little, Brown 1971 (essays)
• Mary Chesnut's Civil War , Yale UP 1981 (received the Pulitzer Prize )
• Editor with Elizabeth Muhlenfeld The Private Mary Chestnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries 1984
• Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History , Louisiana State University Press, 1986
• The Old World's New World , Oxford UP 1991
• The Letters of C. Vann Woodward, editor Michael O'Brien, Yale University Press 2013

Web links

• Brady M. Banta, article in Encyclopedia of Arkansas
• Encyclopædia Britannica

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sheldon Hackney C. Vann Woodward, Dissenter , Historically Speaking, January 2009, Project Muse ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Brady M. Banta in Encyclopedia of Arkansas, see web links 
2. ^ Member History: C. Vann Woodward. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 1, 2019 . 
3. ^ Members: C. Vann Woodward. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed May 5, 2019 .