Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History

In this brief combination of autobiography and criticism, C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999)--at his death the dean of southern historians--effectively summarizes his major historical theses and others' criticisms of them, especially those of his three major works, Origins of the New South (1951), Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), and The Burden of Southern History (1960). From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the older orthodoxy from which Woodard drew blood, the world of heroic "redeemers" and wicked carpetbaggers, seems hopelessly antiquated and toothless, perhaps one reason for remembering that it once was a dominant southern motif. Nevertheless, this book seems to be typical of autobiographical works in that the first half proves more interesting than the second.