Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 24, 2004|Volume 33, Number 4

C. Vann Woodward

Event honors late historian of American South

The Yale University Library will host a symposium honoring C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999), a Yale historian who revolutionized the way scholars examined the history of the American South, on Friday, Oct. 1.

The symposium, which commemorates the opening of the C. Vann Woodward papers in the Library's Manuscripts and Archives Department, will focus on Woodward's influence as a subject of biography and as a mentor for other scholars of history.

Among the panelists at the symposium will be several noted historians and former students of Woodward's, including Barbara J. Fields, professor of history at Columbia University; Sheldon Hackney, professor of U.S. history at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and former president of UPenn and Tulane universities; and William S. McFeely, the Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at the University of Georgia and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his 1981 biography of Ulysses S. Grant.

The symposium, which is open to the public, will take place at 2:30 p.m. in the Library's lecture hall (located near the Wall Street entrance), with a reception following in the Memorabilia Room. It is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Manuscripts and Archives Department.

"The C. Vann Woodward symposium celebrates the opening of the Woodward Collection and gives researchers a preview of it," says Glenda Gilmore, the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, who will deliver closing remarks at the symposium. "Since scholars will use the collection to understand Vann Woodward as an historian and as a teacher, the symposium speakers include Woodward biographers and students. Because of Woodward's long and illustrious career, his papers will also provide a window on historical practice in the 20th century, the struggle for black civil rights and the passing of the first New South. The symposium marks Yale's decades-long commitment to teaching Southern history, and it brings home to Yale many of those who learned their craft under Vann Woodward."

Born in Arkansas, C. Vann Woodward graduated with a degree in philosophy from Emory University and received his graduate degrees from Columbia University, where he met W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from which he received his doctorate in 1937.

Interest in Woodward's dissertation brought him the opportunity to write a volume on the New South for the History of the South Series. That book, "Origins of the New South: 1877-1913," was delayed by Woodward's three-year stint in the Naval Reserve. It was finally published in 1951 and won the prestigious Bancroft Prize.

In 1961, Woodward joined the faculty of Yale University as the Sterling Professor of History. During the 1960s and 1970s, he was prolific in his research, writing and editing. In 1974, he headed a panel that produced the Woodward Report, which defined Yale's position on the right to free speech on campus and on which Yale's free-speech policy is based to this day. He retired from Yale in 1977, but remained active as a historian and editor. In 1982, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book "Mary Chesnut's Civil War." Woodward died in 1999 at the age of 91.

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IN MEMORIAM