Announcing the Winner of the 2024 George and Ann Richards Prize

Guy Emerson Mount has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2024. The article, “Shall I Go? Black Colonization in the Pacific, 1840-1914” appeared in the December 2024 special issue, Black Internationalism in the Era of Emancipation, guest edited by Brandon R. Byrd.

The prize committee was impressed by the article’s “innovative approach and its illuminating insights” and praised it for creating “an innovative historical arc that illuminates how white state crafters sought to tackle the problem of emancipation through colonization.” The committee called the article “beautifully written” and predicted that it “will not only offer scholars of slavery, abolition, Reconstruction, and US imperialism a new way to think about the connections between these topics but also fuel further conversation about the place of the Pacific in the histories of nineteenth-century America.”

Mount is an Assistant Professor of History and an affiliate in African American Studies at Wake Forest University. He teaches courses in Atlantic History, Antebellum America, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Global History of Reparations.  He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago under the direction of Tom Holt.  While at Chicago, he co-founded the Reparations at UChicago Working Group which first uncovered the University’s historical ties to slavery while organizing alongside residents of the South Side of Chicago for reparations.  Previously he held a Carter G. Woodson fellowship at the University of Virginia and a tenure-track position at Auburn University where he was granted the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award in 2022. His current book project, from which the winning article is derived, is tentatively titled Black Elsewheres: Slavery, Empire, and Reconstruction in the Black Pacific.

Awarded annually, the Richards Prize celebrates the generosity of George and Ann Richards, who were instrumental in the growth of the Richards Civil War Era Center and in the founding of The Journal of the Civil War Era. The journal is grateful for the service of this year’s prize committee: Joanna Cohen, Queen Mary University of London (chair); Anne Sarah Rubin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Gabriel (Jack) Chin, University of California, Davis School of Law.