J. Woodford Howard, Jr. papers
Scope and Contents
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.
Dates
- Creation: 1930s-2003
- Creation: Majority of material found within 1970 - 2000
Creator
- Howard, J. Woodford, Jr. (Person)
Conditions Governing Access
This collection is open for use. Student, personnel, and university committee files in Series 3 are subject to access restrictions. Access is restricted to education records of living students or former students, as defined by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, unless the student or former student grants access in writing. If it is not possible to verify date of death, the student will be assumed to be deceased 80 years after date of graduation, or date of last attendance. University records are closed for 25 years from the point of creation, personnel files are subject to further restrictions.
This collection is housed off-site and requires 48-hours' notice for retrieval. Contact Special Collections for more information.
Conditions Governing Use
Single copies may be made for research purposes. Researchers are responsible for determining any copyright questions. It is not necessary to seek our permission as the owner of the physical work to publish or otherwise use public domain materials that we have made available for use, unless Johns Hopkins University holds the copyright.
Biographical / Historical
J. Woodford ‘Woody’ Howard, Jr. was a political science and constitutional law professor at Johns Hopkins University. He was born in Ashland, Kentucky on July 5th, 1931, and raised in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, the son of Florence Stephens Howard and J. Woodford Howard, Sr., a lawyer. As a child, Howard attended public schools and the Kentucky Military Institute.
In 1952, Howard graduated summa cum laude from Duke University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. He then attended graduate school at Princeton University, where he earned a M.P.A. from the School of Public and International Affairs in 1954, and a M.A. from the Department of Politics in 1955. Between 1955 and 1957, Howard served as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force (SAC) in Morocco. He then worked as a political science instructor at Lafayette College, and was later promoted to Assistant Professor upon earning his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1959 under the supervision of American legal scholar Alpheus T. Mason. Howard taught at Duke University as an Assistant and an Associate Professor from 1962-1967, and then joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University as an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science in 1967. A former chair of the department, in 1969 he was promoted to Professor, and then again as the Thomas P. Stran Professor of Political Science in 1975, a position he held until his retirement in 1996.
Howard’s research interests were American public law and the judicial process. He served as a Procter Fellow at Princeton University and a Carnegie Fellow in Law and Political Science at Harvard University in 1961-1962. In 1969, the Ford Foundation awarded Howard a faculty fellowship to study the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Howard published numerous articles and two books during his career, Mr. Justice Murphy: A Political Biography (Princeton University Press, 1968), and Courts of Appeals in the Federal Judicial System: A Study of the Second, Fifth, and District of Columbia Circuits (Princeton University Press, 1981) which was awarded the American Bar Association Certificate of Merit in 1982. Howard was also working on an authorized biography of U.S. Circuit Judge Harold R. Medina for Princeton University Press, which was incomplete at the time of his death.
Howard received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association in 2008. In addition to political science, he also took interest in the arts, serving on the board of the Shriver Hall Concert Series at Johns Hopkins University and the board of trustees at the Baltimore Museum of Art. He was married to Valerie Barclay and had one daughter, Elaine. He passed away on May 19, 2017 at the age of 85.
Sources:
Howard, J. Woodford, Jr. Curriculum vitae. 1996.
Rasmussen, Frederick N. “J. Woodford 'Woody' Howard Jr., Hopkins Professor and Patron of the Arts.” The Baltimore Sun, May 27, 2017. Accessed September 26, 2022. https://www.baltimoresun.com/obituaries/bs-md-ob-j--woodford-howard-20170526-story.html.
Schmidt, Patrick. "In Memoriam: J. Woodford Howard, Jr." American Political Science Association, October 2017. Accessed September 26, 2022. https://politicalscience.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/55/2017/09/In-Memoriam_J.-Woodford-Howard-Jr..pdf
Extent
0.00022 Gigabytes (MS-0908_001) : 1 dataset
8.85 Cubic Feet (7 record center boxes, 1 card file box containing a floppy disk)
Language of Materials
English
Abstract
The professional papers of Professor J. Woodford Howard, Jr. (1931-2017), a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Howard's academic interests were American public law and the judicial process, and his papers include correspondence, working files, and university committee and student records from the 1930s to 2003.
Arrangement
This collection is arranged into three series: Series 1 - Professional correspondence, Series 2 - Working files, and Series 3 - University committee and student files. The files in Series 1 are arranged alphabetically by the last name or organization name of the correspondent; letters within each file are arranged chronologically.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Donated by J. Woodford Howard, Jr. in 2012.
Bibliography
Schmidt, Patrick. "In Memoriam: J. Woodford Howard, Jr." American Political Science Association, October 2017. Accessed September 26, 2022. https://politicalscience.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/55/2017/09/In-Memoriam_J.-Woodford-Howard-Jr..pdf
Processing Information
Processed by Kristen Diehl in September 2022. The original arrangement and folder titles created by Howard were retained in most cases; some folder titles were reformatted for additional clarity or context. Materials were rehoused in archival folders.
Source
- Howard, J. Woodford, Jr. (Donor, Person)
Subject
- Murphy, Frank, 1890-1949 (Person)
- Medina, Harold R. (Harold Raymond), 1888-1990 (Person)
Function
Genre / Form
- Student records
- articles
- Correspondence
- floppy disks
- manuscripts (documents)
- research (documents)
- typescripts
Topical
- Title
- Guide to the J. Woodford Howard, Jr. papers
- Author
- Kristen Diehl
- Date
- 2022 September
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Repository Details
Part of the Special Collections Repository
The Sheridan Libraries
Special Collections
3400 N Charles St
Baltimore MD 21218 USA
specialcollections@lists.jhu.edu