Henderson-Brown College
C. Vann Woodward went to which school from 1929 to 1930?
C . Vann Woodward Comer Vann Woodward ( November 13 , 1908 – December 17 , 1999 ) was a Pulitzer-prize winning American historian focusing primarily on the American South and race relations . He was long a supporter of the approach of Charles A . Beard , stressing the influence of unseen economic motivations in politics . Stylistically , he was a master of irony and counterpoint . Woodward was on the left end of the history profession in the 1930s . By the 1950s he was a leading liberal and supporter of civil rights . His demonstration that racial segregation was a late-19th-century invention rather than some sort of eternal standard made his The Strange Career of Jim Crow into the historical Bible of the civil rights movement , said Martin Luther King Jr . After attacks on him by the New Left in the late 1960s , he moved to the right politically . Early life and education . C . Vann Woodward was born in Vanndale , a town named after his mothers family and the county seat from 1886 to 1903 . It was in Cross County in eastern Arkansas . Woodward attended high school in Morrilton , Arkansas . He attended Henderson-Brown College , a small Methodist school in Arkadelphia , for two years . In 1930 he transferred to Emory University in Atlanta , Georgia , where his uncle was dean of students and professor of sociology . After graduating , he taught English composition for two years at Georgia Tech in Atlanta . There he met Will W . Alexander , head of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation , and J . Saunders Redding , a historian at Atlanta University . Woodward enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University in 1931 and received his M.A . from that institution in 1932 . In New York , Woodward met , and was influenced by , W . E . B . Du Bois , Langston Hughes , and other figures who were associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement . After receiving his masters degree in 1932 , Woodward worked for the defense of Angelo Herndon , a young African-American Communist Party member who had been accused of subversive activities . He also traveled to the Soviet Union and Germany in 1932 . He did graduate work in history and sociology at the University of North Carolina . He was granted a Ph.D . in history in 1937 , using as his dissertation the manuscript he had already finished on Thomas E . Watson . Woodwards dissertation director was Howard K . Beale , a Reconstruction specialist who promoted the Beardian economic interpretation of history that deemphasized ideology and ideas and stressed material self-interest as a motivating factor . In World War II , Woodward served in the Navy , assigned to write the history of major battles . His The Battle for Leyte Gulf ( 1947 ) became the standard study of the largest naval battle in history . Career . Woodward , starting out on the left politically , wanted to use history to explore dissent . He approached W . E . B . Du Bois about writing about him , and thought of following his biography of Watson with one of Eugene V . Debs . He picked Georgia politician Tom Watson , who in the 1890s was a populist leader focusing the anger and hatred of poor whites against the establishment , banks , railroads and businessmen . Watson in 1908 was the presidential candidate of the Populist Party , but this time was the leader in mobilizing the hatred of the same poor whites against blacks , and a promoter of lynching . The Strange Career of Jim Crow . Woodwards most influential book was The Strange Career of Jim Crow ( 1955 ) , which explained that segregation was a relatively late development and was not inevitable . After the Supreme Courts decision in Brown v . Board of Education , in spring 1954 , Woodward gave the Richards Lectures at the University of Virginia . The lectures were published in 1955 as The Strange Career of Jim Crow . With Woodward in the audience in Montgomery , Alabama , in March 1965 , Martin Luther King Jr . proclaimed the book the historical bible of the Civil Rights Movement . It reached a large popular audience and helped shape the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s . Jim Crow laws , Woodward argued , were not part of the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction ; they came later and were not inevitable . Following the Compromise of 1877 , in the 1870s and 1880s there were localized informal practices of racial separation in some areas of society along with what he termed forgotten alternatives in others . Finally the 1890s saw white southerners capitulate to racism to create legally prescribed , rigidly enforced , state-wide Jim Crowism . Origins of the New South , 1877–1913 . Scholars especially praised Origins of the New South , 1877–1913 , which was published in 1951 by Louisiana State University Press in a prominent multivolume history of the South . It combined the Beardian theme of economic forces shaping history , and the Faulknerian tone of tragedy and declension . He insisted on the discontinuity of the era , and rejected both the romantic ante-bellum popular images of the Lost Cause School as well as the overoptimistic business boosterism of the New South Creed . Sheldon Hackney , a Woodward student , hails the book , explaining : Of one thing we may be certain at the outset . The durability of Origins of the New South is not a result of its ennobling and uplifting message . It is the story of the decay and decline of the aristocracy , the suffering and betrayal of the poor whites , and the rise and transformation of a middle class . It is not a happy story . The Redeemers are revealed to be as venal as the carpetbaggers . The declining aristocracy are ineffectual and money hungry , and in the last analysis they subordinated the values of their political and social heritage in order to maintain control over the black population . The poor whites suffered from strange malignancies of racism and conspiracy-mindedness , and the rising middle class was timid and self-interested even in its reform movement . The most sympathetic characters in the whole sordid affair are simply those who are too powerless to be blamed for their actions . Appointments , teaching and awards . Woodward taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1946 to 1961 . He became Sterling Professor of History at Yale from 1961 to 1977 , where he taught both graduate students and undergraduates . He did much writing but little original research at Yale , writing frequent essays for such outlets as the New York Review of Books . He directed scores of PhD dissertations , including those by John W . Blassingame ; former chair of the African American studies program at Yale ; Daniel W . Crofts , former chair of the History Department at The College of New Jersey ; James M . McPherson ; Patricia Nelson Limerick , Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder ; Michel Wayne , Professor of History at the University of Toronto ; Steven Hahn , Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania ; John Herbert Roper , Richardson Chair of American History at Emory & Henry College ; and David L . Carlton , Professor of History at Vanderbilt University . In 1974 , the United States House Committee on the Judiciary asked Woodward for an historical study of misconduct in previous administrations and how the Presidents responded . Woodward led a group of fourteen historians and they produced a 400-page report in less than four months , Responses of the Presidents to Charges of Misconduct . In 1978 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Woodward for the Jefferson Lecture , the U.S . federal governments highest honor for achievement in the humanities . His lecture , entitled The European Vision of America , was later incorporated into his book The Old Worlds New World . Woodward won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for Mary Chesnuts Civil War , an edited version of Mary Chesnuts Civil War diary . He won the Bancroft Prize for Origins of the New South . Move to the Right . Peter Novick says , Vann Woodward was always very conflicted about the presentism of his work . He alternated between denying it , qualifying it , and apologizing for it . British historian Michael OBrien , the editor of Woodwards letters in 2013 , says that by the 1970s : He became greatly troubled by the rise of the black power movement , disliked affirmative action , never came to grips with feminism , mistrusted what came to be known as theory , and became a strong opponent of multiculturalism and political correctness . In 1969 , as president of the American Historical Association , Woodward led the fight to defeat a proposal by New Left historians to politicize the organization . He wrote his daughter afterwards , The preparations paid off and I had pretty well second-guessed the Rads on every turn . In 1975-6 Woodward led the unsuccessful fight at Yale to block the temporary appointment of Communist historian Herbert Aptheker to teach a course . Radicals denounced his actions but a joint committee of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association exonerated the process and found that there was no evidence that political criteria had been used . In 1987 he joined the conservative scholars who made up the National Association of Scholars , a group explicitly opposed to the academic Left . Woodward wrote a favorable review in the New York Review of Books of Dinesh DSouzas Illiberal Education : The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus . It said that Duke University used racial criteria when it hired John Hope Franklin ; Franklin and Woodward publicly feuded . Hackney says , Woodward became an open critic of political correctness and in other ways appeared to have shifted his seat at the political table . Death and legacy . C . Vann Woodward died December 17 , 1999 , in Hamden , Connecticut , at the age of 91 . The Southern Historical Association has established the C . Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize , awarded annually to the best dissertation on Southern history . There is a Peter V . and C . Vann Woodward Chair of History at Yale ; it is now held by southern historian Glenda Gilmore . ( Peter was Woodwards son , who died at age 25 in 1969. ) He was a Charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers . Works . Books . - Tom Watson , Agrarian Rebel ( 1938 ) - The Battle for Leyte Gulf ( 1947 , new ed . 1965 ) - Origins of the New South , 1877–1913 ( 1951 ) borrow for 14 days - Reunion and Reaction : The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction ( 1951 , rev . ed . 1991 ) - The Strange Career of Jim Crow . ( 1st ed . February 1955 ; 2nd ed . August 1965 ; 3rd ed . NY:Oxford University Press , 1974 ) . . borrow for 14 days - The Age of Reinterpretation ( 1961 ) . pamphlet - The Burden of Southern History ( 1955 ; 3rd ed . 1993 ) - The Comparative Approach to American History ( 1968 ) , editor - American Counterpoint ( 1971 ) . essays - Mary Chesnuts Civil War ( 1981 ) , editor . Pulitzer prize . - Oxford History of the United States ( 1982–2018 ) , series editor . - The Private Mary Chestnut : The Unpublished Civil War Diaries ( 1984 ) edited , with Elizabeth Muhlenfeld . - Thinking Back : The Perils of Writing History ( Louisiana State University Press , 1986 ) . memoirs - The Old Worlds New World ( 1991 ) . lectures - The Letters of C . Vann Woodward . edited by Michael OBrien , ( Yale University Press , 2013 ) Major journal articles . - Tom Watson and the Negro in Agrarian Politics . Journal of Southern History , Vol . 4 , No . 1 ( Feb. , 1938 ) , pp . 14–33 . - The Irony of Southern History . Journal of Southern History , Vol . 19 , No . 1 ( Feb. , 1953 ) , pp . 3–19 . - The Political Legacy of Reconstruction . Journal of Negro Education , Vol . 26 , No . 3 , The Negro Voter in the South ( Summer , 1957 ) , pp . 231–240 . - The Age of Reinterpretation . American Historical Review , Vol . 66 , No . 1 ( Oct. , 1960 ) , pp . 1–19 . - Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy . Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , Vol . 110 , No . 1 ( Feb . 18 , 1966 ) , pp . 1–9 . - History and the Third Culture . Journal of Contemporary History , Vol . 3 , No . 2 , Reappraisals ( Apr. , 1968 ) , pp . 23–35 . - The Southern Ethic in a Puritan World . William and Mary Quarterly , Vol . 25 , No . 3 ( Jul. , 1968 ) , pp . 344–370 . - Clio With Soul . Journal of American History , Vol . 56 , No . 1 ( June , 1969 ) , pp . 5–20 . - The Future of the Past . American Historical Review , Vol . 75 , No . 3 ( Feb. , 1970 ) , pp . 711–726 . - The Erosion of Academic Privileges and Immunities . Daedalus , Vol . 103 , No . 4 , ( Fall , 1974 ) , pp . 33–37 . - The Aging of America . American Historical Review , Vol . 82 , No . 3 ( Jun. , 1977 ) , pp . 583–594 . - The Fall of the American Adam . Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , Vol . 35 , No . 2 ( Nov. , 1981 ) , pp . 26–34 . - Strange Career Critics : Long May they Persevere . Journal of American History , Vol . 75 , No . 3 ( Dec. , 1988 ) , pp . 857–868 . - Look Away , Look Away . Journal of Southern History , Vol . 59 , No . 3 ( Aug. , 1993 ) , pp . 487–504 . Further reading . - Boles , John B. , and Bethany L . Johnson , eds . Origins of the New South Fifty Years Later ( 2003 ) , articles by scholars online review - Ferrell , Robert . C . Vann Woodward in Clios Favorites : Leading Historians of the United States , 1945–2000 . ed by Robert Allen Rutland ; ( 2000 ) pp 170–81 - Hackney , Sheldon . Origins of the New South in Retrospect , Journal of Southern History ( 1972 ) 38#2 pp . 191–216 in JSTOR - Hackney , Sheldon . C . Vann Woodward : 13 November 1908 – 17 December 1999 , Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society ( 2001 ) 145#2 pp 233–240 in JSTOR - Hackney , Sheldon . C . Vann Woodward , Dissenter , Historically Speaking ( 2009 ) 10#1 pp . 31–34 in Project MUSE - Kousser , J . Morgan and James McPherson , eds . Religion , Race and Reconstruction : Essays in Honor of C . Vann Woodward ( 1982 ) , festschrift of articles ; also lists most of his PhD students - Lerner , Mitchell , Conquering the Hearts of the People : Lyndon Johnson , C . Vann Woodward , and The Irony of Southern History , Southwestern Historical Quarterly 115 ( Oct . 2011 ) , 155–71 . - Potter , David M . C . Vann Woodward , in Pastmasters : Some Essays on American Historians , ed . Marcus Cunliffe and Robin W . Winks ( 1969 ) . - Rabinowitz , Howard N . More Than the Woodward Thesis : Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow , Journal of American History ( 1988 ) 75#3 pp 842–856 . in JSTOR - Woodward , C . Vann . Strange Career Critics : Long May They Persevere , Journal of American History ( 1988 ) 75#3 pp 857–868 . a reply to Rabinowitz , in JSTOR - Roper , John Herbert . C . Vann Woodward , Southerner ( 1987 ) , biography - Roper , John Herbert , ed . C . Vann Woodward : A Southern Historian and His Critics ( 1997 ) essays about Woodward External links . - Woodward Papers at Yale with short biography - Oral History Interview with C . Vann Woodward from Oral Histories of the American South - Obituary and interview with Woodwards student , James McPherson , 24 December 1999 David Walsh on the World Socialist Web Site - Who Speaks for the Negro Vanderbilt documentary website