The Burden of Southern History

Front Cover
LSU Press, 1993 - History - 304 pages
"C. Vann Woodward's The Burden of Southern History remains one of the essential history texts of our time. In it Woodward brilliantly addresses the interrelated themes of southern identity, southern published in 1960, the book quickly became a touchstone for generations of students. The third edition contains a chapter, "Look Away, Look Away," in which Woodward finds a plethora of additional ironies in the South's experience. It also includes previously uncollected appreciations of Robert Penn Warren, to whom the book was originally dedicated, and William Faulkner. The Burden of Southern History is quintessential Woodward--wise, witty, ruminative, daring, and as alive in the twenty-first century as when it was written"--P. [4] of cover.
 

Contents

The Historical Dimension
27
John Browns Private War
41
The Deferred Commitment
69
The Political Legacy
89
A Southern Critique for the Gilded Age
109
The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual
141
What Happened to
167
The Irony of Southern History
187
The Burden for William Faulkner
265
The Burden for Robert Penn Warren
281
Copyright

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About the author (1993)

One of the world's most distinguished historians, C. Vann Woodward was born in Vanndale, Arkansas, and educated at Emory University and the University of North Carolina, where he received his Ph.D. in 1937. After teaching at Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Florida, and Scripps College for a time, in 1946 he joined the faculty at The Johns Hopkins University, where he began producing the many young Ph.D.s who have followed him into the profession. In 1961 he became Sterling Professor at Yale University, where he remains today as emeritus professor. He has been the Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University, and Commonwealth Lecturer at the University of London. Past president of all the major historical associations, he holds the Gold Medal of the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a member of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society. His honors also include a Bancroft Prize for Origins of the New South, 1876--1913 (1951) and a 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981). A premier historian of the American South and of race relations in the United States, Woodward studies the South in a way that sheds light on the human condition everywhere. In recent years he has turned his attention increasingly to comparative history.