This chapter explores how “two of the South's ablest interpreters, William Faulker and C. Vann Woodward, may have complemented, supplemented, or contradicted each other as they examined a common time and place ” Both struggled, for instance, to give African American figures the same historical weight and agency attributed to whites, and both at times cast a sympathetic eye on the antebellum planter class. Moreover, Woodward drew directly on Faulkner in developing his account of what he called the “burden of southern history”: a historical experience and consciousness among southerners that he nominated as an alternative to white supremacy as the basis of a distinctive regional identity and the central theme of a distinctive regional history.