The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward

C. Vann Woodward

sept 2020 · Oxford University Press

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C. Vann Woodward is one of the most significant historians of the post-Reconstruction South. Over his career of nearly seven decades, he wrote nine books; won the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes; penned hundreds of book reviews, opinion pieces, and scholarly essays; and gained national and international recognition as a public intellectual. Even today historians must contend with Woodward's sweeping interpretations about southern history. What is less known about Woodward is his scholarly interest in the history of white antebellum southern dissenters, the immediate consequences of emancipation, and the history of Reconstruction in the years prior to the Compromise of 1877. Woodward addressed these topics in three mid-century lecture series that have never before been published. The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward presents for the first time lectures that showcase his life-long interest in exploring the contours and limits of nineteenth-century liberalism during key moments of social upheaval in the South. Historians Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner analyze these works, drawing on correspondence, published and unpublished material, and Woodward's personal notes. They also chronicle his failed attempts to finish a much-awaited comprehensive history of Reconstruction and reflect on the challenges of writing about the failures of post-Civil War American society during the civil rights era, dubbed the Second Reconstruction. With an insightful foreword by eminent Southern historian Edward L. Ayers, The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward offers new perspectives on this towering authority on nineteenth- and twentieth-century southern history and his attempts to make sense of the past amidst the tumultuous times in which he lived.

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Natalie J. Ring is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author of The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 and co-editor of The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South. Sarah E. Gardner is Distinguished University Professor in History at Mercer University. She is the author of Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 and Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance. Edward L. Ayers is Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. He is the author of many award-winning books, including The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (OUP, 1992, 2007) and The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America.