November 13, 1908

C. Vann Woodward was born in Vanndale (Cross County). Woodward was arguably the twentieth century’s foremost Southern historian. Published in the 1950s, his Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 and The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which Martin Luther King Jr. said was the bible of the civil rights movement, remain vital interpretive narratives. His edited work, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, and he also served as president of the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Association.