"Origins of the New South" Fifty Years Later

The Continuing Influence of a Historical Classic

edited by John B. Boles

304 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations

History / United States - Southern History

It is rare for an academic book to dominate its field half a century later as Woodward's Origins does southern history. Although its explanations are not accepted by all, the volume remains the starting point for every work examining the South in the era between Reconstruction and World War I. In writing Origins, Woodward deliberately set out to subvert much of the historical orthodoxy he had been taught during the 1930s, and he expected to be lambasted. But the revisionist movement was already afoot among white southern historians by 1951 and the book was hailed. Woodward's work had an enormous interpretative impact on he historical academy and encapsulated the new trend of historiography of the American South, an approach that guided both black and white scholars through the civil rights movement and beyond.

John B. Boles is William P. Hobby Professor of History at Rice University and managing editor of the Journal of Southern History. He is the author of The South through Time: A History of an American Region, Black Southerners, 1619-1869 and numerous other books. In 2004, he was honored with the Rice University Distinguished Alumni Award and he has received multiple teaching awards.

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