C. Vann Woodward
Comer Vann Woodward (November 13, 1908 - December 17, 1999) was a pre-eminent American historian focusing primarily on the American South and race relations. He was considered, along with Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to be one of the most influential historians of the postwar era, 1940s-1970s, both among scholars and the general public. He was long an advocate of Beardianism, stressing the influence of unseen economic motivations in politics. He was a master of irony and counterpoint.
C. Vann Woodward was born in Vanndale, a town named after his mother's family, in Cross County, Arkansas. Woodward attended high school in Morrilton, Arkansas. He attended Henderson-Brown College a small Methodist school in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, for two years. In 1930 he transferred to Emory University, where his uncle was Dean of students and professor of sociology. After graduating he taught English composition for two years at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. There he met Will W. Alexander, head of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and J. Saunders Redding an historian at Atlanta University.
The Southern Historical Association has established the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize awarded annually to the best dissertation on Southern history.
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Several global companies are headquartered in the northwest corner of Arkansas, including Wal-Mart (the world's largest public corporation by revenue in 2007), J.B. Hunt and Tyson Foods. This area of the state has experienced an economic boom since the 1970s as a result.
In recent years, automobile parts manufacturers have opened factories in eastern Arkansas to support auto plants in other states. Additionally, the city of Conway is the site of a school bus factory.
Tourism is also very important to the Arkansas economy; the official state nickname "The Natural State" was originally created (as "Arkansas Is A Natural") for state tourism advertising in the 1970s, and is still regularly used to this day.
She was born in Statesburg, South Carolina, to Mary Boykin and Stephen Decatur Miller, who had been a U.S. Senator and governor of South Carolina. On April 23, 1840, she married James Chesnut, Jr., who was elected to the Senate in 1850. Once the Civil War broke out, James became an aide to Jefferson Davis and a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. They lived in Charleston, South Carolina.
Mary's diary began on February 15, 1861, and ended on August 2, 1865. It was a diary on her impression of events as they unfolded during the Civil War. Because she had no children, the diary passed to one of her friends upon her death. It was first published in 1905 as A Diary from Dixie, and an expanded edition was published in 1949. Yet another edition, edited by C. Vann Woodward and entitled Mary Chesnut's Civil War, was published in 1981 and won a Pulitzer Prize the next year.
Readings from her diary play an important role in the documentary television series, The Civil War by Ken Burns. Chesnut's diary entries were recited by Academy Award-winning actress Julie Harris.
On March 1, 2000, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced that the James and Mary Boykin Chesnut House in Camden, South Carolina, had been designated as a National Historic Landmark due to its importance to America's national heritage and literature.
The plantation house was the location in which Mary Boykin Chesnut resided when she recorded in her diary events of the Civil War and her observations on their effect on the home front and southern society. Her diary is acknowledged by literary scholars as the most important piece of literature produced by a Confederate author. It also reflects the growing difficulties of the Confederacy.
