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.

Call for 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.

Congratulations to Edda L. Fields-Black

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.

Past Winners

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

2023 – R. Isabella Morales,  Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2022). Read Morales’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

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.