C. Vann Woodward; Historian Focused on South, Race

C. Vann Woodward, an influential historian whose work shaped America’s understanding of the South and its views on race issues, has died.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author and retired Yale professor died Friday at his home in Hamden, Conn., a university spokesman said. Woodward, 91, underwent open heart surgery in July and had been suffering complications from that procedure in recent months.

Woodward was considered by many colleagues to be the preeminent scholar in his field. “He was the dean of American historians,” said Sean Wilentz, a former student who is a professor of history at Princeton. “He had a lasting impact on the study of the American South. . . . On other issues, as well, he really was a luminescent figure among American historians.”

In books like “Origins of the New South, 1877-1913,” which was awarded the Bancroft Prize in 1952 as one of the year’s two best works in American history, Woodward altered understanding of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period.

“It’s still in print, still used, still assigned,” said James M. McPherson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Princeton professor who also studied under Woodward. “That’s pretty remarkable for a book written 50 years ago,” McPherson said.

The prevailing view until the publication of “Origins” was that the postwar struggle to rebuild the South was between agrarian landowners of the Old South and carpetbaggers, industrialists from the North. Woodward believed the struggle was actually between the landowners of the South and a new generation of Southern industrialists. This battle to direct the economic recovery of the region led to a disastrous result: The South became more deeply mired in poverty.

Woodward’s most noted work, however, was “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” a 1955 bestseller that documented that segregation, as expressed by Jim Crow laws, did not appear decades or centuries before the Civil War but at the beginning of the 20th century.

Woodward “was the first person, the first distinguished Southern historian, to talk about the South in a very objective way,” said Howard Lamar, the Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. “He told it like it was.”

The book changed the way lawmakers, historians and civil rights leaders viewed the genesis of segregation. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called the book “the bible of the civil rights movement.”

Before publishing the book, Woodward prepared a paper from his research that was submitted as part of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People’s brief in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education segregation case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The material was “instrumental in helping strike down the segregation laws,” Wilentz said.

Earlier this year, a panel organized by the book publisher Modern Library placed “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” on its list of the century’s 100 best English-language books of nonfiction.

Woodward was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for a book he edited called “Mary Chesnut’s Civil War,” which offered an account of the conflict from the letters of a Southern woman. And while the prize was given for his adept editing of the material, many felt that the award was in recognition of his long and distinguished career in American letters.

The son of a public school administrator and the grandson of a Confederate soldier who had been a major slaveholder before the Civil War, Woodward developed an interest in the South early. Born in Vanndale, Ark., he received his bachelor’s degree from Emory University in Atlanta and his master’s at Columbia before getting his PhD at the University of North Carolina. He taught at a number of schools, including Georgia Tech and Johns Hopkins, before joining the Yale faculty in 1961.

He was a lieutenant in the Navy and was stationed in the Pacific during World War II. His experiences there led to publication in 1947 of “The Battle of Leyte Gulf.”

Woodward stayed at Yale until 1977, remaining as a professor emeritus, and continued to write.

“He came to history out of a desire to understand himself and created a whole new way of understanding the late 19th century South,” said Sheldon Hackney, former president of the University of Pennsylvania and now a history professor there. “His framework is still pretty much in place.”