Comer Vann Woodward (
November 13, 1908 -
December 17, 1999) was a pre-eminent
American historian focusing primarily on the
American South and
race relations. He was considered, along with
Richard Hofstadter and
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to be one of the most influential historians of the postwar era, 1940s-1970s, both among scholars and the general public. He was long an advocate of
Beardianism, stressing the influence of unseen economic motivations in politics. He was a master of irony and counterpoint.
C. Vann Woodward was born in
Vanndale, a town named after his mother's family, in
Cross County, Arkansas. Woodward attended high school in
Morrilton, Arkansas. He attended
Henderson-Brown College a small Methodist school in
Arkadelphia, Arkansas, for two years. In 1930 he transferred to
Emory University, 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 an historian at Atlanta University.
Woodward took graduate courses in sociology at
Columbia University in 1931 where he met, and was influenced by,
Langston Hughes and the
Harlem Renaissance movement. In 1932 he worked for the defense of Angelo Herndon, a young
Communist Party member who had been accused of subversive activities. He 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. Woodward's 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, he served on the historical staff of the Navy, writing battle reports, including
The Battle of Leyte Gulf (1946).
Woodward taught at
Johns Hopkins University from 1946 to 1961 and at
Yale from 1961 to 1967.
In
1974, the House Committee on the Judiciary asked Woodward for a historical study of misconduct in previous administrations and how the Presidents responded. Woodward led a group of fourteen historians and they produced a thorough 400 page report in less than 4 months,
Responses of the Presidents to Charges of Misconduct.
Woodward won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for
Mary Chesnut's Civil War, an edited version of
Mary Chesnut's Civil War diary. He won the
Bancroft Prize for
The Origins of the New South.
Martin Luther King, Jr. called
The Strange Career of Jim Crow "the historical bible of the civil rights movement."
C. Vann Woodward died in
Hamden, Connecticut.
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. 
