Tom Watson Brown Book Award

The $50,000 Tom Watson Brown Book Award is presented annually by the Watson-Brown Foundation and the Society of Civil War Historians to the author or authors of the best book “on the causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War,” published in the preceding year.

Each year Tad Brown, president of the Watson-Brown Foundation, presents the Tom Watson Brown Book Award at a special banquet during the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association.

Congratulations to R. Isabella Morales

Winner of the 2023 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation are proud to announce that R. Isabela Morales is the recipient of the 2023 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Morales earned the award for Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom which was published in 2022 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.

In making its selection, the prize committee stated: “Happy Dreams of Liberty tells the story of the extended Townsend family: African Americans freed by the wills of Samuel and Edward Townsend, their fathers and enslavers in Alabama. With graceful prose and deep empathy R. Isabela Morales tells a sweeping American story of multiple generations’ struggles to first gain their freedom, then preserve it and thrive through the tumultuous Civil War and Reconstructions eras. We follow the Townsends from Alabama to Ohio, Kansas, and Colorado as they search for places where they can live free from interference and discrimination. This is a model of microhistory, using the Townsend’s unique circumstances to illuminate broad questions about race, color, and liberty.

This is a sprawling family drama, full of contradictions and conflict. Morales tells it beautifully, almost novelistically, by imbuing it with atmosphere and minute detail. Some Townsends attended Wilberforce in Ohio before the Civil War, another fought in the Union Army. After the war, one became a successful barber and entrepreneur in Colorado, and another returned to Alabama as a politician, clinging to political power as the constrictions of Jim Crow closed in.

The book is a powerful read, one that is as much the story of America in the nineteenth century as it is the story of a family. We are unanimous in our praise for, and selection of, this important work.”

The Watson Brown Book Award jury consisted of Anne Sarah Rubin (chair), Frances M. Clarke, Adam Rothman, and Tad Brown, President of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc.

Dr. Morales will be honored at the SCWH banquet taking place this November during the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, held this year in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Winner Biography

Isabela Morales is an award-winning author and public historian. She is the Editor of the Princeton & Slavery Project, an expansive historical investigation into Princeton University’s links to the institution of slavery. She also serves as the Education & Exhibit Manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum (SSAAM), central New Jersey’s first Black history museum. Dr. Morales received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2019 and a B.A. in history and American Studies from The University of Alabama in 2012, where she first began the research that would become Happy Dreams of Liberty.

Past Winners

2022 – Sebastian Page, Black Resettlement and the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Read Page’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2021 – Thavolia Glymph, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (UNC Press, 2020). The Women’s Fight also won the Albert J. Beveridge Award and Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, both from the American Historical Association; the Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award, Darlene Clark Hine Award, and Mary Nickliss Prize, all from the Organization of American Historians; the John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History, from the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia; and the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians. Read Glymph’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2020 – Thomas J. Brown, Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (UNC Press, 2019). Read Brown’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2019 – Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through The Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (UNC Press, 2018). Embattled Freedom also received the Avery O. Craven Award and the Merle Curti Award in social history, both from the Organization of American Historians. In addition, it was awarded the John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War era history from the University of Virginia’s John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. Read Taylor’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2018 – Andrew F. Lang, In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America (LSU Press, 2017). Read Lang’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2017 – Christopher Phillips, The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border (Oxford University Press, 2016). The Rivers Ran Backward also received the Midwestern History Association’s Jon Gjerde Prize and the Ohio Academy of History’s Distinguished Book Award. Read Phillips’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2016 – Earl J. Hess, Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness (LSU Press, 2015). Read Hess’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2015 – Shauna Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (UNC Press, 2014). Learning from the Wounded also won the Wiley-Silver Prize from The Center for Civil War Research, University of Mississippi. Read Devine’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2014 – Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013). A Misplaced Massacre also received the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University and the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians, both in 2014. It was awarded the Antoinette Foster Downing Prize by the Society of Architectural Historians in 2015. Read Kelman’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2013 – John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: the Laws of War in American History (Simon and Schuster, 2012). Lincoln’s Code also earned the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University and the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, both in 2013. It was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for history, as well. Read Witt’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2012 – Gary Gallagher, The Union War (Harvard University Press, 2011). The Union War also received the Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies from the New York Military Affairs Symposium in 2011 and the Daniel M. and Marilyn W. Laney Prize from the Austin, Texas Civil War Round Table in 2012. Read Gallagher’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2011 – Mark Geiger, Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861-1865 (Yale University Press, 2010). Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War also received the Francis B. Simkins Prize from the Southern Historical Association and earned an Honorable Mention for the Lincoln Prize, awarded by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, in 2011. Read Geiger’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2010 – Daniel Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: the Decisive Role of Guerillas in the American Civil War (UNC Press, 2009). A Savage Conflict also earned the Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum in 2009 and the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History in 2010.