author
Howard Washington Odum
1884–1954
A pioneering sociologist of the American South, he built a career around studying regional life, race relations, and folklore with unusual breadth. At the University of North Carolina, he also helped create institutions that shaped social-science research for decades.
2 Audiobooks
Negro workaday songs
by Howard Washington Odum, Guy Benton Johnson
Religious Folk-Songs of the Southern Negroes
by Howard Washington Odum
About the author
Born in Georgia in 1884, Howard Washington Odum became one of the best-known sociologists working on the modern South. His research focused on southern society, social reform, and African American life and folklore, and his early books helped bring subjects often ignored by academics into wider discussion.
After studies at Emory, the University of Mississippi, Clark University, and Columbia, he joined the University of North Carolina in 1920. There he played a major institutional role, helping found the university press, the journal Social Forces, and the research center now known as the Odum Institute.
Odum was also a prolific author whose work ranged from sociology and regional studies to public welfare and culture. He died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1954, and he is still remembered for trying to understand the South as a whole—its problems, its traditions, and its possibilities for change.