The Strange Career of Jim Crow.

WOODWARD, C. Van.

Item Number: 110788

New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

First edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian’s classic work. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Uncommon.

Woodward’s most widely read book is The Strange Career of Jim Crow, in which he showed that the legal segregation of whites and blacks was not rooted in “time immemorial” as had been routinely claimed by Southerners but was actually a relatively recent phenomenon that had been erected in the South following the defeat of the Populist movement in the 1890s. The book helped provide a rationale for attempts at desegregation in the 1950s and ’60s because it showed that whites had lived on basically equal terms with blacks for two decades even after the end of Reconstruction in 1876.