This research examines Woodward's Origins of the New South. The research will set forth a summary of the book's contents and then analyze the methodology Woodward employs to articulate the pattern of ideas that make up the text, with a view toward (1) assessing the book's contribution to the literature of the transformation of the South in the period following Reconstruction, and (2) identifying the degree to which the text deals with the subject of American populism in the last part of the 19th century until just before World War I.
In order for a 2003 reader to understand the content of Origins of the New South, it is essential to appreciate the chronological perspective from which it was originally written: 1951. The significance of that year is that it predated the enormous transformation of the structure of prevailing social custom and practice that was most visible in the South, namely, legally sanctioned segregation. Woodward's preface to the 1971 reissue of the original text acknowledges the enormous "social upheaval" (1971, p. vii) that occurred in the South between 1951 and 1971. Indeed Brown vs. Board of Education came in 1954, Rosa Parks's bus adventure and the Montgomery, Ala., boycott in 1956-1957, the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965. These events and others like them were to transform legal protections for segregation, but the run-up to them is the concern of Woodward's text.
The narrative plan of Origins of the New South is to track the shift in social, political, and economic circumstances in the former Confederacy from the time of the formal end to Reconstruction to the early 20th century. However, one of the principal arguments of Origins of the New South is that it is difficult to reduce the concept of the New South to one simple formulation. Woodward objects, indeed, to that very term. He refers to "New-South propagandists" (p. 50), such as newspapers and some politicians, who construc...