Background
Roper, John Herbert was born on August 9, 1948 in Greenville, South Carolina, United States. Son of Edmund Ravenel and Dorothy (Watson) Roper.
(This collection of essays by historians of the American S...)
This collection of essays by historians of the American South, provides a critique of the career and writings of C. Van Woodward. The contributors explore his work from various angles and illuminate his quest to understand the influence of racial and social dynamics of his region and times.
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( This is the most thorough and comprehensive biography t...)
This is the most thorough and comprehensive biography to date of writer and activist Paul Green (1894-1981). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his play In Abraham's Bosom and author of the pioneering symphonic drama The Lost Colony, Green was a literary figure of national prominence during the 1920s and 1930s. During this time of experimentation and boldness in American theater, Green was praised by directors and critics, had a play chosen three times for the collection Year's Best Plays, and gained the respect of African American actors longing for meaningful roles. Green's personal and political convictions fully complemented the social-realist leanings of his art, a literary output comprising plays in many forms, essays, folklore collections, novels, and film scripts. In places like his native North Carolina, Green stood apart even from other proponents of integration by claiming that sexual as well as social intermingling of the races was a natural occurrence in human society. Drawing on his complete access to Green's papers and on interviews with surviving family members, John Herbert Roper covers all the important aspects of Green's life and career--his childhood, military service, education, travels, and marriage, as well as his many literary undertakings and friendships. By word and deed, Paul Green spread the faith of liberalism across the New South, which he insistently called the "Real South." Long after literary fashion had left him behind, he wrote daily and remained at the forefront of causes concerning race relations, militarism, women's and workers' rights, and capital punishment. As an artist and an individual, Green set an early and enduring standard of courage and forthrightness.
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( The most influential historian of our time, C. Vann Woo...)
The most influential historian of our time, C. Vann Woodward has forged his place in American learning and culture from two sometimes opposing, sometimes complementary urges: to work for social justice and to reveal the past without bias. Underlying his career has been the knowledge that his native South, because of its traumatic experience of defeat and disgrace, holds within its past truths that could instruct the nation as a whole, perhaps ease it through the dilemmas and racial inequality and social strife, and guide it away from the mad pursuits of war and political repression. C. Vann Woodward, Southerner is a chronicle of Woodward’s life, of the tumultuous times that have engaged him and shaped his thought, and of the historical profession that has accorded him its highest honors of respect and unstinting criticism. Jack Roper begins with Woodward’s birth, in 1908, to an aristocratic family in eastern Arkansas and his youth in the Oachita valley. By the time Woodward left his home state to study at Emory University, he had already demonstrated the urge toward dissent that drove him, throughout the first decades of his career, to confront social and racial injustice, to press relentlessly outward from his own position of security and confront the civil strife that simmered outside the hedgerows of academia. In Chapel Hill and Atlanta, in New York and Baltimore, in his books and in his actions, Woodward spoke to the present even as he wrote of the past. By no means uncritical of Woodward’s works, Roper nonetheless shows that books such as Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, Origins of the New South, and The Strange Career of Jim Crow have effectively defined the terms of historical debate, often asking the impertinent first question” that spurred other historians to seek fuller answers. Of those books, The Strange Career of Jim Crow is closest to Woodward’s ultimate concerns and has caused him his gravest doubts--for a time he almost disowned the book that Martin Luther King, Jr. called the bible of the civil rights movement.” Those doubts came at a time in American history that Woodward found particularly ominous: the Vietnam years when it seemed that the lights of civil rights and social progress had lost their steady glow. In the mid-1970s, however, Woodward regained his political engagement, and today he continues his work of bringing--through numerous book reviews and essays--the insights of the historical profession to the intelligent, concerned reader. What has the historian to do with hope?” These words of Woodward’s late colleague David Potter in response to The Strange Career of Jim Crow encapsulate the conflict that both inspired and occasionally beset that book’s author. For it is Woodward’s almost continual commitment to social change that made his books so powerful when they were published, so diminished in strength when examined in later decades. This tension between advocacy and scholarship, between experience and learning both marks the greatest challenge for Woodward and defines his greatness as a cultural figure, as a conscience for his profession and for our time.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0820309338/?tag=2022091-20
Roper, John Herbert was born on August 9, 1948 in Greenville, South Carolina, United States. Son of Edmund Ravenel and Dorothy (Watson) Roper.
Bachelor of Arts in History, University South Carolina, 1970. Master of Arts in History, University North Carolina, 1973. Doctor of Philosophy in History, University North Carolina, 1977.
Master of Engineering in Economics, North Carolina State University, 1981.
Visiting lecturer University North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1977—1977. Visiting assistant professor Florida International University, Miami, 1978—1979. Associate professor St. Andrews College, Laurinburg, North Carolina, 1979—1988.
Professor Emory (Virginia) & Henry College, 1988—1996, Richardson professor, since 1996. With National Guard United States Army, 1971-1977.
(This collection of essays by historians of the American S...)
( This is the most thorough and comprehensive biography t...)
( The most influential historian of our time, C. Vann Woo...)
Scoutmaster Boy Scouts American, Emory, since 1990. Vestry, member standing committee Episcopalian Church, Roanoke, since 1988. Member of History Society, Southern History Association, Kiwanis, St. George Tucker Society.
Married Margarita Adele Bowers, May 20, 1972. Children: John Herbert Junior, James Kyle.