Book Description

"It is not hyperbole to state that C. Vann Woodward is the most significant historian of the post-Reconstruction South. His accomplishments are staggeringly impressive: he wrote nine books; edited six volumes; won the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes; penned hundreds of book reviews, opinion pieces, and scholarly essays; served as President of the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Association; and gained recognition as a national and international public intellectual. What is less known about Woodward is his scholarly interest in the history of antebellum southern nonconformists and dissenters aside from Mary Chestnut, the immediate consequences of emancipation, and the political and social agenda of assorted historical factions during Reconstruction. The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward presents for the first time in print two sets of lectures that Woodward delivered at mid-century, LSU's Fleming Lectures in 1951 and Cornell's Messenger Lectures in 1964. Both sets reflect Woodward's life-long interest in exploring the contours and limits of southern liberalism in key moments of great change in the South. The analysis by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner draws on correspondence and Woodward's personal notes to chronicle his failed attempts to finish a much-awaited comprehensive history of Reconstruction, which he saw as the natural outgrowth of the Messenger Lectures. The letdown involving the latter project is all the more significant given that he had come to imagine the book as a companion to the Origins of the New South, one of the most lasting pieces of scholarship in the field. An original introduction by Ring and Gardner will precede the reprinted lectures focusing on the antebellum and Reconstruction periods, situating them within the context of historiographical debates as well as C. Vann Woodward's correspondence, notes on his projected book, published works, and unpublished essays. The lectures reprinted in this collection, then, offer readers new perspectives on the greatest authority on the history of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century South"--