One of the world's most distinguished historians, C. Vann Woodward was born in Vanndale, Arkansas, and educated at Emory University and the University of North Carolina, where he received his Ph.D. in 1937. After teaching at Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Florida, and Scripps College for a time, in 1946 he joined the faculty at The Johns Hopkins University, where he began producing the many young Ph.D.s who have followed him into the profession. In 1961 he became Sterling Professor at Yale University, where he remains today as emeritus professor. He has been the Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University, and Commonwealth Lecturer at… the University of London. Past president of all the major historical associations, he holds the Gold Medal of the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a member of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society. His honors also include a Bancroft Prize for Origins of the New South, 1876--1913 (1951) and a 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981). A premier historian of the American South and of race relations in the United States, Woodward studies the South in a way that sheds light on the human condition everywhere. In recent years he has turned his attention increasingly to comparative history.
Born in Ridgewood (Queens), New York, William Leuchtenburg is currently William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was educated at Cornell University and at Columbia University, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1951. After teaching briefly at Smith College and Harvard University, he began a 30-year tenure on the faculty at Columbia, where he became De Witt Clinton Professor of American History in 1971. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the Society of American Historians, and most recently (1991) the American Historical Association. He has also been Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University.… Leuchtenburg is an expert on twentieth-century U.S. political history, especially the era of the New Deal. His book Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932--1940 (1963) won both the Bancroft and Parkman prizes.