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Winner of the Bancroft Prize After more than two decades, Origins of the New South is still recognized both as a classic in regional historiography and as the most perceptive account yet written on the period which spawned the New South. Historian Sheldon Hackney recently summed it up this way:
"The pyramid still stands. Origins of the New South has survived relatively untarnished through twenty years of productive scholarship, including the eras of consensus and of the new radicalism. . . . Woodward recognizes both the likelihood of failure and the necessity of struggle. It is this profound ambiguity which makes his work so interesting. Like the myth of Sisyphus, Origins of the New South still speaks to our condition." This enlarged edition contains a new preface by the author and a critical essay on recent works by Charles B. Dew.
About the author
C. Vann Woodward is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. A native of Arkansas, he earned his under-graduate degree at Emory University. He holds M.A. degrees from Columbia University and Oxford University and the Ph.D. degree from the University of North Carolina. He has served as president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. He won the Bancroft Prize for this book in 1952 and the Sydnor Award for
The Burden of Southern History in 1962. He was a recipient of the National Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award in 1954. Among his other books are
Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and
Reunion and Reaction.
