The collection documents Dr. J. Woodford Howard, Jr.’s professional life, primarily from his time as a graduate student at Princeton University in the 1950s through his academic career at Lafayette College and Duke University, and as the Thomas P. Stran Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University from the 1960s until his retirement from the university in 1996. The collection is divided into three series.

Series 1: Professional correspondence primarily consists of letters between Howard and colleagues at other universities, letters of recommendation for former students, and correspondence with manuscript editors at assorted political science journals. The correspondence dates from 1955, when Howard was a graduate student at Princeton University, until 2003, following Howard’s retirement from Johns Hopkins. The bulk of the material dates from 1960 to 2000.

Series 2: Working files consists of papers, lectures, and session proposals for professional conferences and annual meetings, including the American Political Science Association and the Federal Judicial Center. The series also contains correspondence and drafts of articles published in political science journals, such as the American Political Science Review (APSR) and the Journal of Politics (JOP), on topics including judicial biography and his doctoral advisor Alpheus T. Mason, the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren Burger, and the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Howard served on the editorial boards of APSR and JOP, and the series includes manuscript reviews and editorial correspondence from those publications. There are also several files of publisher correspondence, research, and chapter drafts for two of Howard’s books, Mr. Justice Murphy: A Political Biography (Princeton University Press, 1968), and an authorized biography on U.S. Circuit Judge Harold R. Medina, including three files of correspondence between Howard and Medina from 1975 to 1986.

Series 3: University and committee files is primarily made up of files Howard maintained for various graduate students from 1960 to 2001, including letters of recommendation and correspondence with the students throughout their careers. These files are mostly for Johns Hopkins University students; although there is a file of recommendation letters for students he taught at Lafayette College in the early 1960s. This series also contains files Howard maintained for Johns Hopkins University committees, primarily on the governance of the university and academic affairs of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences from the late 1960s to the 1990s. There are also some files which contain course materials; although the collection has limited course syllabi, lectures, or notes from Howard’s teaching career.