C. Vann Woodward

C. Vann Woodward is still one of the most famous historians known throughout the world. He was born in Vanndale, Arkansas, a little town about fifty miles Northwest of Little Rock. He found out that most of his ancestors had been slave owners in the past. Woodward enrolled at Emory College around 1930, and by the time he graduated, the depression had hit. This was a development that radicalized Woodward, like many other great American intellectuals. He began taking graduate courses at Columbia University in New York City in 1931. While in New York, he met Langston Hughes and other members of the Harlem Renaissance group.

Woodward wrote many great books. His very first, and perhaps most famous work was Tom Watson, Agarian Rebel in 1938. In it, he examined the life of the Georgia Populist whose career in some ways exemplified the political contradictions of the post-Civil War South. Watson began his life as a radical who vigorously attacked the moneyed interests. As late as 1895, he denounced the legal disenfranchisement of blacks with the statement that “All this reactionary legislation is wrong” and that “Old fashioned democracy taught that a man who fought the battles of his country, and paid his taxes of his government, should have a vote”. By 1906, having concluded that populism would become a serious force only when blacks were excluded from political life, Watson had become an aggressive race-baiter, representing what Woodward called “the most ignorant, bigoted and reactionary forces in American life”. Woodward had many other great works like the Origins of the New South, his second major work, and he also wrote others like The Strange Career of Jim Crow, The Burden of Southern History, and The Private Mary Chestnut, just to name a few.

Woodward was recognized as a major literary figure as well. He was elected to membership in the Academy of Arts and Letters. Although his most significant works received academic recognition, in 1982 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his edited volume, Mary Chesnut's Civil War, an award long overdue. He earned these honors justly, fulfilled their responsibilities conscientiously, and wore them with gentlemanly modesty and bemused self-deprecation. One of Woodward's last public