After more than two decades, Origins of the New South is still recognized both as a classic in regional historiography and as the most perceptive account yet written on the period which spawned the New South.

Historian Sheldon Hackney recently summed it up this way:“The pyramid still stands. Origins of the New South has survived relatively untarnished through twenty years of productive scholarship, including the eras consensus and of the new radicalism....Woodward recognizes both the likelihood of failure and the necessity of struggle. It is this profound ambiguity which makes his work so interesting. Like the myth of Sisyphus, Origins of the New South still speaks to our condition.”

This enlarged edition contains a new preface by the author and a critical essay on recent works by Charles B. Dew. 

C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999) was Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught from 1961 until 1977. One of the leading historians of the century, Woodward wrote several books about the American South, his main field of interest. He edited Mary Chesnut's Civil War, for which he received the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for history. His other major works include Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel; American Counterpoint; The Strange Career of Jim Crow; Reunion and Reaction; Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History; and Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, for which he received the Bancroft Prize. He served as president of the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Association, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.