From a Wall Street Journal story by Barton Swaim about the book by James C. Cobb titled “C. Vann Woodward: America’s Historian”:

In the years before he died in 1999 at the age of 91, C. Vann Woodward held a semisacred status among professional historians and American intellectuals generally. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., with whom Woodward was often compared, called him the “conscience” of the historical profession and the chief source of its “moral leadership.” Drew Gilpin Faust, later the president of Harvard, called him “the twentieth century’s greatest American historian.”