Voting Station

C. Vann Woodward

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Author

The Resume

    (November 13, 1908-December 17, 1999)
    Born in Vanndale, Arkansas
    Birth name was Comer Vann Woodward
    Historian with an emphasis on race relations and the American South
    Sterling Professor of History at Yale (1961-78)
    Wrote 'Origins of the New South, 1877-1913' (1951), 'The Strange Career of Jim Crow' (1955), 'American Counterpoint' (1971) and 'Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing American History' (1986)
    Won the Pulitzer Prize for History for editing and annotating the Civil War diaries of Mary Chesnut (1982)

Why he might be annoying:

    Due to his left-wing politics, he was denied a security clearance to be appointed historical advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1951).
    He opposed admitting women as fellows of Yale colleges.
    He dismissed black studies as 'a fashionable cause.'
    He never got around to writing a long-planned general history of the Reconstruction Era.
    Asked to contribute to a book of essays celebrating the American Bicentennial, he declined, adding 'I am, in fact, beginning to wonder what there is to celebrate.'

Why he might not be annoying:

    He was fired from a teaching position at Georgia Tech after defending Angelo Herndon, a black labor leader who had been charged with 'insurrection' for organizing a multiracial protest by unemployed workers (1933).
    He served in the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II.
    He led efforts to desegregate the annual meetings of the Southern Historical Association.
    He assisted Thurgood Marshall with the historical aspects of his arguments in the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
    Martin Luther King, Jr., called 'The Strange Career of Jim Crow' 'the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.'
    Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust called him 'the 20th Century's greatest American historian.'

Credit: C. Fishel


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    In 2023, Out of 26 Votes: 23.08% Annoying