C. Vann Woodward

Includes 6 charts and 20 photos Pulitzer prize winning author C. Vann Woodward recounts the story of the largest naval battle of all time. “The Battle for Leyte Gulf was the greatest naval battle of the Second World War and the largest engagement ever fought on the high seas. It was composed of four separate yet closely interrelated actions, each of which involved forces comparable in size with those engaged in any previous battle of the Pacific War. The four battles, two of them fought simultaneously, were joined in three different bodies of water separated by as much as 500 miles. Yet all four were fought between dawn of one day and dusk of the next, and all were waged in the repulse of a single, huge Japanese operation. “They were guided by a master plan drawn up in Tokyo two months before our landing and known by the code name Sho Plan. It was a bold and complicated plan calling for reckless sacrifice and the use of cleverly conceived diversion. As an afterthought the suicidal Kamikaze campaign was inaugurated in connection with the plan. Altogether the operation was the most desperate attempted by any naval power during the war-and there were moments, several of them in fact, when it seemed to be approaching dangerously near to success. “Unlike the majority of Pacific naval battles that preceded it, the Battle of Leyte Gulf was not limited to an exchange of air strikes between widely separated carrier forces, although it involved action of that kind. It also included surface and subsurface action between virtually all types of fighting craft from motor torpedo boats to battleships, at ranges varying from point-blank to fifteen miles, with weapons ranging from machine guns to great rifles of 18-inch bore, fired “in anger” by the Japanese for the first time in this battle.”

The Battle For Leyte Gulf [Illustrated Edition]

Southern Populist leader Thomas E. Watson was a figure alternately eminent and notorious. Born before the Civil War, he lived through the turn of the century and past the close of the First World War, pursuing his career in an era as changing and paradoxical as himself. In the nineteenth century, Watson championed the rising Populist movement, an interracial alliance of agricultural interests, against the irresistible forces of industrial capitalism. The movement was broken under the wheels of the industrial political machine, but survived into the twentieth century in various “fantastic shapes...to be understood mainly by the psychology of frustration.” Political frustration transformed Watson as well, from liberal to racial bigot and from popular spokesman to mob leader. In this biography, through careful study of public and private writings, and through objective and tolerant exposition, Mr. Woodward has attempted to solve the enigma of this man who did much to alter his times and who was, in turn, altered by them. “Mr. Woodward’s biography of Watson is a model of its kind. It has all the obvious qualities of scholarship, thoroughness and impartiality. It has, in addition, a sympathetic understanding of broad social movements, a mature appreciation of character, an original interpretation of economic facts and factors, an incisive criticism of political techniques, and a literary style that is always vigorous and sometimes brilliant.”—H. S. Commager, New York Herald Tribune Books “Mr. Woodward’s biography of Watson constitutes the best one-volume history that has appeared of that first crop of social ideals, politically garnered in Populism...Mr. Woodward’s biography is also valuable in that it is something more than the story of Populism. It is a striking portrait of a man.”—W. A. White, Saturday Review of Literature Includes the Author’s Preface to the 1955 Reissue.

Agrarian Rebel

Tom Watson

C. Vann Woodward is one of the most significant historians of the post-Reconstruction South. Over his career of nearly seven decades, he wrote nine books; won the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes; penned hundreds of book reviews, opinion pieces, and scholarly essays; and gained national and international recognition as a public intellectual. Even today historians must contend with Woodward's sweeping interpretations about southern history. What is less known about Woodward is his scholarly interest in the history of white antebellum southern dissenters, the immediate consequences of emancipation, and the history of Reconstruction in the years prior to the Compromise of 1877. Woodward addressed these topics in three mid-century lecture series that have never before been published. The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward presents for the first time lectures that showcase his life-long interest in exploring the contours and limits of nineteenth-century liberalism during key moments of social upheaval in the South. Historians Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner analyze these works, drawing on correspondence, published and unpublished material, and Woodward's personal notes. They also chronicle his failed attempts to finish a much-awaited comprehensive history of Reconstruction and reflect on the challenges of writing about the failures of post-Civil War American society during the civil rights era, dubbed the Second Reconstruction. With an insightful foreword by eminent Southern historian Edward L. Ayers, The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward offers new perspectives on this towering authority on nineteenth- and twentieth-century southern history and his attempts to make sense of the past amidst the tumultuous times in which he lived.

The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward

C. Vann Woodward's The Burden of Southern History remains one of the essential history texts of our time. In it Woodward brilliantly addresses the interrelated themes of southern identity, southern distinctiveness, and the strains of irony that characterize much of the South's historical experience. First published in 1960, the book quickly became a touchstone for generations of students. This updated third edition contains a chapter, "Look Away, Look Away," in which Woodward finds a plethora of additional ironies in the South's experience. It also includes previously uncollected appreciations of Robert Penn Warren, to whom the book was originally dedicated, and William Faulkner. This edition also features a new foreword by historian William E. Leuchtenburg in which he recounts the events that led up to Woodward's writing The Burden of Southern History, and reflects on the book's -- and Woodward's -- place in the study of southern history. The Burden of Southern History is quintessential Woodward -- wise, witty, ruminative, daring, and as alive in the twenty-first century as when it was written.

The Burden of Southern History

I. Bernard Cohen

Stephan Thernstrom

Gordon Wright

Paul Keith Conkin

John Whitney Hall

Vanderbilt University

Lawrence Stone

Lewis W. Spitz

Woodrow Borah

Richard William Leopold

Centennial Symposium on the Future of History

Centennial Symposium on the Future of History, Vanderbilt University, 1975

Kenneth Alan Lockridge

Essays in the Vanderbilt University Centennial Symposium

The Future of History

divC. Vann Woodward was one of the most prominent and respected American historians of the twentieth century. He was also a very gifted and frequent writer of letters, from his earliest days as a young student in Arkansas and Georgia to his later days at Yale when he became one of the arbiters of American intellectual culture./DIVdiv /DIVdivFor the first time, his sprightly, wry, sympathetic, and often funny letters are published, including those he wrote to figures as diverse as John Kennedy, David Riesman, Richard Hofstadter, and Robert Penn Warren. The letters shed new light not only on Woodward himself, but on what it meant to be an American radical and public intellectual, as well as on the complex politics and discourse of the historical profession and the anxious modulations of Southern culture./DIV

The Letters of C. Vann Woodward

The strange career of Jim Crow

C. Vann Woodward

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