Winner of the 2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Award The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation are proud to announce that Yael A. Sternhell is the recipient of the 2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Sternhell (pictured left) earned the award for War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War which was published in 2023 by Yale University Press. The $50,000 award is funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation in honor of Tom Watson Brown, a dedicated student of the Civil War. Dr. Yael Sternhell is an associate professor of history and American studies at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Harvard University Press, 2012) and War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2023). Her work has won awards from the Southern Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, and both of her books were shortlisted for the Lincoln Prize. In 2024-2025, she will be the Weinstock Visiting Associate Professor of History at Harvard University. 
In making its selection, the prize committee stated: “This volume explores how the documentary collection best known as the Official Records was assembled by officials of the US government in a process that reflected embedded agendas, various priorities, assumptions about what to include and exclude, issues of organization, and other concerns that fundamentally shaped the most important documentary editing edition ever produced by a federal agency. Historians will have to wrestle with this revealing work and its implications for the writing of Civil War history; thanks to Sternhell's trailblazing scholarship, they will never again view the Official Records in quite the same way." The Watson Brown Book Award jury (pictured right) consisted of Brooks D. Simpson (chair), Diane Miller Sommerville, Susannah Ural, and Tad Brown, President of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc. Dr. Sternhell was honored at the SCWH banquet in November during the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, held in Kansas City, Missouri. |
