C. Vann Woodward - Professional Roles

Professional Roles

Woodward taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1946 to 1961. He became Sterling Professor of History at Yale from 1961 to 1977, where he taught both graduate students and undergraduates. He did much writing but little original research at Yale, writing frequent essays for such highbrow outlets as the New York Review of Books. He directed scores of PhD dissertations, including those by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Michael Wayne (historian), Professor of History at the University of Toronto; Steven Hahn, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania; John Herbert Roper, Richardson Chair of American History at Emory & Henry College and noted Civil War scholar; and David L. Carlton, professor of History at Vanderbilt University.

In 1969, as president of the American Historical Association, Woodward led the fight to defeat a proposal by New Left historians to politicize the organization. He wrote his daughter afterwards, "The preparations paid off and I had pretty well second-guessed the Rads on every turn."

In 1974, the United States House Committee on the Judiciary asked Woodward for an historical study of misconduct in previous administrations and how the Presidents responded. Woodward led a group of fourteen historians and they produced a thorough 400 page report in less than four months, Responses of the Presidents to Charges of Misconduct.

In 1975-6 Woodward led the unsuccessful fight at Yale to block the temporary appointment of Communist historian Herbert Aptheker to teach a course. Radicals denounced his actions but a joint committee of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association exonerated the process and found that there was no evidence that political criteria had been used. In 1977 he joined the conservative scholars who made up the National Association of Scholars, a group explictly opposed to the academic Left. Woodward wrote a favorable review in the New York Review of Books of Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. It said that Duke University used racial criteria when it hired John Hope Franklin; Franklin and Woodward publicly feuded. Hackney says, "Woodward became an open critic of political correctness and in other ways appeared to have shifted his seat at the political table."

In 1978 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Woodward for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. His lecture, entitled "The European Vision of America," was later incorporated into his book The Old World's New World.

Woodward won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for Mary Chesnut's Civil War, an edited version of Mary Chesnut's Civil War diary. He won the Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South.

C. Vann Woodward died in Hamden, Connecticut.

The Southern Historical Association has established the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize, awarded annually to the best dissertation on Southern history. There is a Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Chair of History at Yale; it is now held by southern historian Glenda Gilmore.