Few works of history merit the treatment that C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951) gets in this fiftieth-anniversary tribute. Most historical writing, however important in its time, becomes superseded by newer research and approaches, bypassed by shifting fashions, or dated in its presumptions. If still considered half a century on, it is likely to be treated mainly as itself a historical artifact, evidence of an intellectual lost world.

However, the dominant mood of this collection of writings on Origins and its legacy (most from a conference held at Rice University in 2001 but also including previously published commentaries with new afterwords from their authors) is anything but antiquarian. Origins is regarded by scholars of the post–Civil War South as the founding monograph of their field—a mighty achievement that contemptuously swept aside generations of self-justifying propaganda, made space for pluralism in a hitherto monolithic “southern identity,” and forced the region's problems, conflicts and injustices onto the historical agenda.

To be sure, this view of Origins has elements of a founding myth. For that reason, perhaps the most stimulating piece in the collection, by Bethany Johnson, is the one essay that tackles the myth head-on. Johnson points out that, for all Woodward's claims to have challenged the conventional wisdom of an economically progressive, unified, and racially harmonious New South freeing itself of the misrule of Reconstruction, Origins was in fact the culmination of at least 20 years of reassessment of the post-Reconstruction South, and southern historians were surprisingly receptive both to the book and to Woodward himself. Most of the contributors, though, persist in the commonly held view that Origins upended the field; indeed, James C. Cobb's contribution buoys it with an impressively researched exploration of the struggles of the young Woodward with the mossbacks that dominated southern historical studies in the 1930s.

Some of the contributors take serious issue with aspects of Origins. Noteworthy in this regard are two reprinted critiques from the 1970s, by Carl Harris and James Tice Moore, of Woodward's view of the political leadership of the post-Reconstruction South as Whigs in Democratic drag. Anne Firor Scott (and, more gently, Glenda Gilmore) fault Origins on its neglect of women. More commonly, though, contributors defer to Origins's authority while recasting its themes in ways that subtly transform them. Drawing on the arguments of Elizabeth Sanders's Roots of Reform (1999), Robert C. McMath contends that the “Populist moment” of the 1890s—the pivot on which Origins turns—should be reconceived as part of a broader and longer-lasting agrarian reform movement; in the process he blurs the distinction between Populists and Democrats so vital to Woodward's vision of the New South. Of particular interest to economic historians is Harold Woodman's contribution, in which he accepts Woodward's basic contention that “bourgeois” values came to dominate the post-Emancipation South, but views those values as arising, not from towns or industrialism, but from the transformation of southern agriculture itself. Even the conflicts between Populists and Democrats, dirt farmers and lien merchants that are so central to Origins were, Woodman argues, struggles “within the business class (p. 255).” Woodman admits that such a conclusion would likely have outraged Woodward himself; nonetheless, he sees it as flowing naturally from the larger theme of Origins: the death of a singular society and its incorporation into a bourgeois, modernizing American society.

By the evidence of these essays, after half a century Origins maintains a unique position in American historical literature: a parent work to which all practitioners in its field continue to look for their model, even as it has been subtly transfigured in the course of two generations of exegesis. Like another fictional father, Origins can be said to have “suffer[ed] a sea-change/into something rich and strange.”