How did he manage so extraordinary a level of productivity over so long a period? One result, recalls a former Woodward student, was that he “taught us to think for ourselves and to present our own conclusions clearly and persuasively.

He joined his colleagues John Blum and Edmund Morgan, as a coauthor of a highly successful text book, The National Experience (published in 1963), which went through many editions.

In addition, he shared ideas with David Brion Davis, the late John Blassingame, Peter Gay, and his former student Robin Winks, and he formed close friendships with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

After he retired in 1977, he did not slacken the pace but produced the superbly edited Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. His many distinctions included the presidencies of the AHA (1969: you can read his presidential address here) and the Organization of American Historians (1968–69). He questioned the findings of their research papers in similar fashion.

Origins of the New South Fifty Years Later: The Continuing Influence of a Historical Classic. As a young activist who helped defend the indicted black Communist Angelo Herndon in the early 1930s, he verged on the radical side of issues himself, but later in that decade grew disillusioned with American and international Communism.

Throughout Woodward’s long life, however, he retained a fervent sympathy for underdogs of whatever color or status.

By no means, however, has it lost its popular influence. In that fascinating intellectual autobiography readers look in vain for the figure behind the scholarship.

In his twilight years Woodward contributed enormously to a professional issue about which he had long been concerned, the close connection between the historian and the reading public at large.

Yet ironically Woodward had long since rejected the scriptural faith of his forbears, although not the scriptural influences that King sensed in the historian’s own work.

Half of Vann Woodward’s many achievements would satisfy the ambitions of most of his admirers. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.

Thornton, J.

Mills, III. “C. The Sterling Professor Emeritus, Yale University, was one of the greatest historians of 20th-century America and the most influential scholar ever to interpret the history of the American South to the nation and world. That sense of humor was recalled by Woodward research assistant Michael McGerr '76, ‘84PhD, who remembers meeting Woodward in the Yale Co-op one day.

His adroit balancing of message and historical verification gave much of his work a creative tension.