Randall B. Woods (1944–)

Randall B. Woods is an accomplished historian and prolific author specializing in twentieth century America, especially the post–World War II period. A Texas native, he has been a member of the faculty at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) since 1971.

Randall Bennett Woods was born on October 10, 1944, in Galveston, Texas, to Grady Bennett Woods and Mary Dorothy Stokes Wood. He earned his BA in 1967, his MA in 1969, and his PhD in 1972, all from the University of Texas in Austin.

Woods married Rhoda Margaret Lannen on June 18, 1966; they had a daughter and a son.

Woods began his teaching career at the University of Arkansas in 1971, advancing through the ranks from his initial status as an instructor to become John A. Cooper Professor of American History in 1984 and Distinguished Professor of History in 1995. His teaching has focused on American diplomatic and political history.

Woods served as the Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professor of American Foreign Policy at Williams College in Massachusetts from 2009 to 2010. He also did stints in England, serving as the Mellon Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University in 2012 and the John G. Winant Visiting Professor of American Government at the Rothmere Institute at Oxford University during the 2013–14 academic year. He was chosen as the Mary Ball Washington Distinguished Professor at University College, Dublin and as the Fulbright 50th Anniversary Chair at the University of Bonn.

Woods has authored an extensive array of books on American politics and foreign policy. His 1995 biography of U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright was awarded the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in 1996 and was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize that same year. His other books include The Roosevelt Foreign-Policy Establishment and the “Good Neighbor”: The United States and Argentina, 1941–1945 (1979), A Black Odyssey: John Lewis Waller and the Promise of American Life, 1878–1900 (1981), and A Changing of the Guard: Anglo-American Relations, 1941–1946 (1990). He also co-authored with Howard Jones The Dawning of the Cold War: America’s Quest for Order, 1945–1950 (1991). He followed up his biography of Fulbright with a broader look at the senator and his work in J. William Fulbright, Vietnam, and the Search for a Cold War Foreign Policy (1998). His list of publications also includes a two-volume textbook, The American Experience: A Concise History (2000), which he co-authored with Willard B. Gatewood, as well as the textbook Unto a Good Land: A History of the American People (2005), for which he was one of six contributors. He also edited Vietnam and the American Political Tradition: The Politics of Dissent (2003). His list of publications also includes Quest for Identity: America Since 1945 (2004), LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (2006), Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA (2013), Prisoners of Hope: Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Society, and the Limits of Liberalism (2016), and John Quincy Adams: A Man for the Whole People (2024), an expansive study of one of the nation’s most important early diplomatic and foreign policy figures.

Woods’s teaching and scholarship have both earned him significant recognition. In 1981, he was named a National Endowment for the Humanities senior fellow, and in 1985, he was named a fellow of the Atlantic Council Conference for Academic Associates.

Woods also assumed administrative responsibilities at UA, serving as both associate dean of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences from 1979 to 1982 and Dean of Fulbright College from 1999 to 2002. Woods was the president of the Arkansas Humanities Council (now HumanitiesAR), and his long-time membership in the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) included service as president in 2006.

Woods served in the U.S. Army as a staff sergeant from 1969 to 1975, and he also was a member of the Fayetteville School Board from 1985 to 1988.

For additional information:
“Randall Woods.” Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences, History, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. https://history.uark.edu/directory/faculty/uid/rwoods/name/Randall+B.+Woods/ (accessed April 22, 2025).

William H. Pruden III
Ravenscroft School