Comer Vann Woodward (November 13, 1908 – December 17, 1999) was a Pulitzer-prize winning American historian focusing primarily on the American South and race relations. He was long a supporter of the approach of Charles A. Beard, stressing the influence of unseen economic motivations in politics. Stylistically, he was a master of irony and counterpoint. Woodward was on the left end of the history profession in the 1930s. By the 1950s he was a leading liberal and supporter of civil rights. His demonstration that racial segregation was a late-19th-century invention rather than some sort of eternal standard made his The Strange Career of Jim Crow into “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement”, said Martin Luther King Jr. After attacks on him by the New Left in the late 1960s, he moved to the right politically.[1]
Books in order of publication:
| Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel | 1938 |
| Battle for Leyte Gulf | 1947 |
| Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 | 1951 |
| Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction | 1951 |
| The Strange Career of Jim Crow | 1955 |
| The Burden of Southern History | 1960 |
| The Age of Reinterpretation | 1961 |
| The Comparative Approach to American History | 1968 |
| American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue | 1971 |
| Responses Of The Presidents To Charges Of Misconduct | 1974 |
| Mary Chesnut’s Civil War | 1981 |
| Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History | 1986 |
| The Future of the Past | 1989 |
| The Old World’s New World | 1991 |
| The Letters | 2013 |
