Tom Watson Brown Book Award

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 will be honored at the SCWH banquet in November during the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, held in St. Pete Beach, Florida.

Open: Call for the 2026 Tom Watson Brown Book Award Submissions:

The Society of Civil War Historians solicits nominations for the Tom Watson Brown Book Award for books published in 2025. Publishers are asked to send books, along with a cover letter nominating the work for the Tom Watson Brown Award, directly to the four prize jurors no later than January 31, 2026. Only books published in 2025 will be considered.

All genres of scholarship on the causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War are eligible. This includes, but is not exclusive to, monographs, synthetic works presenting original interpretations, and biographies. Edited collections, works of fiction, poetry, and textbooks, however, will not be considered. Jurors will consider nominated works' scholarly and literary merit as well as the extent to which they make original contributions to our understanding of the period.

Michael E. Woods, Professor of History and Director of the Andrew Jackson Papers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will chair the prize jury. The other members are Kristen T. Oertel, Mary Frances Barnard Chair in 19th-Century American History, University of Tulsa, and Laura F. Edwards, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty in the History Department, Princeton University. Tad Brown, President of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc., will serve as a non-voting member of the jury.

The winner will be announced by August 1, 2026. The prize will be presented at the SCWH banquet at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting, where the winner will deliver a formal address that may be published in a subsequent issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era. Review the 2025 call for submissions here.

Previous Winners of the Tom Watson Brown Book Award:

2024: Yael Sternhell, Tel Aviv University, for War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2023).

2023: R. Isabella Morales, Independent Scholar, for Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, (Oxford University Press, 2022)

2022: Sebastian Page, University of Oxford, for Black Resettlement and the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2021)  

2021: Thavolia Glymph, Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History, Duke University, for The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)

2020: Thomas J. Brown, Professor of History, University of South Carolina, for Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

2019: Amy Murrell Taylor, Associate Professor of History, University of Kentucky, for Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (University of North Carolina Press, 2018)

2018: Andrew Lang, Assistant Professor of History, Mississippi State University, for In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America (Louisiana State University Press, 2017)

2017: Christopher Phillips, John and Dorothy Hermanies Professor of American History and University Distinguished Research Professor in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, University of Cincinnati, for The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border (Oxford University Press, 2016)

2016: Earl J. Hess, Stewart W. McClelland Chair in History, Lincoln Memorial University, for Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness (Louisiana State University Press, 2015)

2015: Shauna Devine, Professor, Schulich School of Medicine and Department of History, Western University, for Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014)

2014: Ari Kelman, Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of History, University of California, Davis, for A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013)

2013: John Fabian Witt, Allen H. Duff Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a Professor of History in the Yale History Department, for Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (Simon & Schuster, 2012)

2012: Gary W. Gallagher, John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia, for The Union War (Harvard University Press, 2011)

2011: Mark W. Geiger, a 2011-12 Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University Library of Congress and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, for Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861-1865 (Yale University Press, 2010)

2010: Daniel E. Sutherland, Distinguished Professor of History, University of Arkansas, for A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War  (University of North Carolina, 2009)