Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel
About this ebook
“Mr. Woodward’s biography of Watson is a model of its kind. It has all the obvious qualities of scholarship, thoroughness and impartiality. It has, in addition, a sympathetic understanding of broad social movements, a mature appreciation of character, an original interpretation of economic facts and factors, an incisive criticism of political techniques, and a literary style that is always vigorous and sometimes brilliant.”—H. S. Commager, New York Herald Tribune Books
“Mr. Woodward’s biography of Watson constitutes the best one-volume history that has appeared of that first crop of social ideals, politically garnered in Populism...Mr. Woodward’s biography is also valuable in that it is something more than the story of Populism. It is a striking portrait of a man.”—W. A. White, Saturday Review of Literature
Includes the Author’s Preface to the 1955 Reissue.
About the author
Comer Vann Woodward (November 13, 1908 - December 17, 1999) was an American historian focusing primarily on the American South and race relations. Along with Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., he was considered to be one of the most influential historians of the post-war era (1940s-1970s), both by scholars and by the general public.
Born in Vanndale, Arkansas, Woodward received his M.A. from Columbia University in 1932 and undertook graduate work in history and sociology at the University of North Carolina. He was granted a Ph.D. in history in 1937, using as his dissertation the manuscript he had already finished on Thomas E. Watson.
In World War II, Woodward served in the Navy and was assigned to write the history of major battles. His book The Battle for Leyte Gulf (1947) became the standard study of the largest naval battle in history.
Woodward taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1946-1961. He became Sterling Professor of History at Yale from 1961-1977, where he taught both graduate students and undergraduates. During his tenure at Yale, he frequently wrote essays for such publications as the New York Review of Books and directed scores of PhD dissertations.
He 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 Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951).
Tom Watson (1938) is one of several of his works that contribute to a delineation of Southern history. The other works are Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951), The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955); and The Burden of Southern History (1955).
Woodward died in Hamden, Connecticut in 1999 aged 91.
