Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).

This book served as the launching pad from which future scholars would build a revisionist history of the era of the late nineteenth century, when the "Jim Crow" system of segregation emerged. Writing in 1955, Woodward acknowledges his closeness to these events, consciously offering the first serious interpretation of a recent era; as such, he admits that there will be mistakes in his interpretation, but that truth can only be found by the new works that would reinterpret Woodward's conclusions. Insofar as the origins of Jim Crowism are unknown and liable for misinterpretation, Woodward hopes to not only shed light on these origins but to relate them to the rapid changes in race relations going on in his own time, which essentially revolve around the same thing, namely segregation. As Woodward hoped, a tremendous amount of work began in large part due to the groundbreaking influence of this work; this is the book's true significance.