Winner of the 2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award:

The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation are proud to announce that Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is the recipient of the 2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Fields-Black earned the award for COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, which was published in 2024 by Oxford 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. Fields-Black is a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center. Throughout her career, Fields-Black has used interdisciplinary sources and methods to uncover the voices of historical actors in pre-colonial West Africa and the African Diaspora who did not author written sources. She has written extensively about the transnational history of West African rice farmers, including in such works as Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Indiana University, 2008, 2014). She was a co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge University, 2015; Chinese translation, 2017), and Fields-Black has also served as a consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's permanent exhibit, "Rice Fields in the Low Country of South Carolina." She is the executive producer and librettist of "Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice," a widely performed original contemporary classical work by celebrated composer John Wineglass.

In making its selection, the prize committee stated: “The scope of this book is simply dazzling.  From its marvelous recreation of Maryland’s eastern shore to its haunting evocation of the Sea Islands to its depiction of the South Carolina interior redolent with the light and shadow of the ponderous Combahee River, COMBEE brings to life different Black communities whose members transcended geographical, cultural, and linguistic differences to wrest their way out of bondage, turn the tide of a key Union military campaign, strike at Confederate war-making capacity, and establish the foundations of Gullah-Geechee culture. COMBEE deepens and enriches our understanding of the lived experience of emancipation as liberation and as humanitarian crisis all at once. It advances conversations on slave flight and resistance before the war, directly linking the antebellum Underground Railroad with the wartime slave rebellion that Fields-Black argues Tubman’s Combahee raid really was. It brings to life the challenge and peril of destroying one economic system and trying to bring about another amidst its ruins. And Fields-Black does all of that without losing sight of the real people who proudly called themselves Combee. This truly astounding book stands in a class by itself.”

The Watson Brown Book Award jury consisted of Chandra Manning (chair), Edna Green-Medford, David Silkenat, and Tad Brown, President of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc.

Dr. Fields-Black was honored at the SCWH banquet in November during the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, held in St. Pete Beach, Florida.