Woodward, C(omer) Vann (1908-1999)

US historian. As a historian who believed that accurate knowledge of the past can contribute to social change, in later years he increasingly brought his authority and knowledge to expressing his views about contemporary issues. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his edition of Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981) and he served as general editor of the multivolume Oxford History of the United States (1982).

Born in Vanndale, Arkansas, he was educated at Emory, gaining a BA in 1930, Columbia University (MA 1932) and the University of North Carolina (PhD 1937). He taught at several universities before serving in the navy during World War II. After the war he taught at John Hopkins (1946-61) and then at Yale (1961-77) while occasionally serving as visiting professor at various institutions.

His half-century of scholarship and publications, focusing on the American South since the Civil War and race relations in the broader sphere, established him as one of the country's most eminent interpreters of the American experience. Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1938) and Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951) set the tone for his career by challenging the entrenched notion that post-Civil War political struggles in the South raged between agrarian landowners and Northern industrial-capitalistic forces; his contention that the struggle was primarily internal, fueled by Southern industrialists, and that economic recovery never really occurred in the post-Reconstruction ‘New South’, set the agenda for Southern historiography for decades. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) showed that legal racial segregation was a 20th-century phenomenon and that Southern discrimination against black Americans was less a result of immutable ‘folkways’ than of political and economic expediency.