Natalie J. Ring is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author of The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 and co-editor of The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South.

Sarah E. Gardner is Distinguished University Professor in History at Mercer University. She is the author of Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 and Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance.
Edward L. Ayers is Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. He is the author of many award-winning books, including The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (OUP, 1992, 2007) and The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America.

• Foreword by Edward L. Ayers


• Introduction


• Editorial Note


• Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University: "Southern Dissenters in Exile" (1951)


• Lecture I: The Men of the Thirties


• Lecture II: The Men of the Fifties


• Lecture III: The Way of the Exile


• Chapter One: The Process of Alienation


• Chapter Two: The Year of Decision


• Messenger Lectures at Cornell University: "The First Reconstruction in the Light of the Second" (1964)


• Lecture II: The Fear of Freedom


• Lecture III: The Paradox of Loyalty


• Lecture IV: The Conservatism of Northern Radicals


• Lecture V: Radicalism for Conservative Southerners


• Lecture VI: Did the North Really Mean It?


• Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School: "Slavery to Freedom: An American Failure" (1969) Lecture I: The Problem of Failure in American History


• Acknowledgments


• Index

The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward focuses on lectures Woodward delivered in the mid-twentieth century that reflect his life-long interest in exploring the contours and limits of liberalism during key moments of great change in the South.