Tom Watson Brown Book Award
The Society of Civil War Historians gives an annual Tom Watson Brown Book Award for the best book published on the causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War. This includes, but is not exclusive to, monographs, synthetic works presenting original interpretations, and biographies. Works of fiction, poetry, anthologies, and textbooks are not considered. Jurors consider nominated works’ scholarly and literary merit as well as the extent to which they make original contributions to our understanding of the period.
The prize is presented at the SCWH banquet at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting, where the winner delivers a formal address that will be published in a subsequent issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era.
2024 Winner of the 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 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.
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 consisted of Brooks D. Simpson (chair), Diane Miller Sommerville, Susannah Ural, and Tad Brown, President of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc.
Dr. Sternhell will be honored at the SCWH banquet taking place this November during the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, held this year in Kansas City, Missouri.
Winner Biography
Dr. Yael Sternhell is 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.
Previous Tom Watson Brown Book Award Winners:
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)
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