C. Vann Woodward
America's Historian
By James C. Cobb
504 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 16 halftones, notes, index
-
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7021-8
Published: October 2022 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-7022-5
Published: September 2022
Buy this Book
- Hardcover $37.50
- E-Book $27.99
For Professors:
Free E-Exam Copies
James C. Cobb offers many original insights into Woodward's early years and private life, his long career, and his almost mythic public persona. In a time where the study and substance of American history are profoundly contested, Woodward's career is replete with lessons in how myths about the past, some created by historians themselves, come to be enshrined as historical truth.
About the Author
James C. Cobb is B. Phinizy Spalding Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Georgia.
For more information about James C. Cobb, visit
the
Author
Page.
Reviews
"Drawing on his subject’s writings and his voluminous papers at Yale, where Woodward taught from 1961 to 1977, Cobb portrays a scholar impatient with the mythologies, distortions and misguided hero worship that for most of the 20th century inhibited discussion of the South’s many problems."—Eric Foner, London Review of Books
"Cobb's biography is a masterpiece. . . . deeply researched, movingly written, and thought-provoking. . . . Cobb's confident command of every part of the story, his exquisite selection of quotations, and the way he blends sophisticated analysis with folksy jabs keep the reader captivated."—Journal of Southern History
"Cobb comments intelligently on Woodward’s many scholarly works and essays. He is particularly sensitive to the ways in which Woodward, in writing about historical events, was also working out his own loyalties as a Southerner."—Wall Street Journal
"A richly detailed biography . . . A rewarding read for scholars of Southern and 20th-century historical references in the United States."—Library Journal
"A fresh and revealing biography."—South Carolina Public Radio
"A deep, generous, and honest account of C. Vann Woodward's remarkable life. The result is not only a humane biography of an important figure but also an eloquent account of the victories and defeats of white liberalism across the twentieth century." —Edward L. Ayers, author of The Promise of the New South