South Since 1941 C Vann Woodwards Essay example essay topic

The two passages I have chosen to compare for my first document analysis are W.J. Cash's essay "The Continuity of Southern History" and C. Vann Woodwards essay "The Discontinuity of Southern History". Both authors agree that summed up in one-word southerners are "extravagant", although they give different illustrations of the same trait. Woodward seems much more passionate and seems to spend much of his time criticizing Cash and less creating his own theories and backing them up. Cash's theories, or the way he presents them, does it in such a calm manner compared to Woodward. However, the two authors still get each of their views across to the reader. W.J. Cash's view in the essay "The Continuity of Southern History" is that "the extent of the change and of the break between the Old South that was and the South of our time has been vastly exaggerated".

With that said, Cash also believes that there is a New South. But Cash's view of the New South depicts that of Industrialization and commercialization of the land and less than that of "the mind of the section". Cash depicts the south with it's own mental and social patterns, those that correlate with the Old South. Cash's view of the south "today" was in 1941. It would be interesting if Cash wrote in our present year and if his view would have changed since so much has changed in the south since 1941. C. Vann Woodwards essay "The Discontinuity of Southern History" gives the view of the Old South giving way to the New South. Woodward writes, "The major monuments of broken continuity in the South are slavery and secession, independence and defeat, emancipation and military occupation, reconstruction and redemption".

Woodward sums up his essay best when he writes "A great slave society, by far the largest and richest of those that had existed in the New World since the sixteenth century, had grown up and miraculously flourished in the heart of a thoroughly bourgeois and partly puritanical republic. It had renounced its bourgeois origins and elaborated and painfully rationalized its institutional, legal, metaphysical, and religious defenses. It had produced leaders of skill, ingenuity, and strength who, unlike those of other slave societies, invested their honor and their lives, and not merely part of their capital, in that society. When the crisis came, they, unlike the others, chose to fight. It proved to be the death struggle of a society, which went down in ruins". Woodward seems to spend much of his essay combating Cash's theories, but after all of his criticisms Woodward gives recognition to Cash as a historian and renders respect to his "troubled spirit".

Again, Woodwards's essay was written in 1964 and much has changed between the time these two documents have been published. The same questioned has to be asked of Woodward if his view of the South's have changed from 1964 to present year.