The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward

This collection presents two sets of lectures that Woodward delivered at mid-century, LSU's Fleming Lectures in 1951 and Cornell's Messenger Lectures in 1964 along with one lecture taken from Yale’s Storrs Lectures in 1969. These lectures reflect Woodward's life-long interest in exploring the contours and limits of nineteenth-century liberalism. The editors draw on correspondence, Woodward's personal notes, and unpublished essays to chronicle his failed attempts to finish a much-awaited comprehensive history of Reconstruction, which he saw as the natural outgrowth of the Messenger Lectures. The letdown involving the latter project is all the more significant given that he had come to imagine the book as a companion to the Origins of the New South, one of the most lasting pieces of scholarship in the field. The Introduction focuses on the antebellum and Reconstruction periods, situating them in the context of mid-twentieth century historiographical debates. These reprinted lectures offer readers new perspectives on one of the most important authorities on the history of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century South.