C. Vann Woodward's The Burden of Southern History remains one of the essential history texts of our time. In it Woodward brilliantly addresses the interrelated themes of southern identity, southern distinctiveness, and the strains of irony that characterize much of the South's historical experience. First published in 1960, the book quickly became a touchstone for generations of students. This updated third edition contains a chapter, Look Away, Look Away, in which Woodward finds a plethora of additional ironies in the South's experience. It also includes previously uncollected appreciations of Robert Penn Warren, to whom the book was originally dedicated, and William Faulkner. This edition also features a new foreword by historian William E. Leuchtenburg in which he recounts the events that led up to Woodward's writing The Burden of Southern History, and reflects on the book's -- and Woodward's -- place in the study of southern history. The Burden of Southern History is quintessential Woodward -- wise, witty, ruminative, daring, and as alive in the twenty-first century as when it was written.

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.
William E. Leuchtenburg is William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of more than a doezen books on twentieth-century American history, including The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson.