William F. Holmes Award

Award Description

In honor of Will Holmes's fifteen years of service as Secretary-Treasurer of the SHA, the Executive Council created the William F. Holmes Award, to be presented every year for the best paper presented at the annual meeting by a graduate student or junior faculty member (anyone who received his or her Ph.D. within three years of the time of presentation). Because adjustments to COVID-19 have effectively bifurcated the Memphis program (half to be presented virtually and half deferred to our 'super-sized' meeting in New Orleans) the Holmes Award for the Memphis 2020 program will be presented in New Orleans. Even so, participants in the virtual Memphis program who wish to be considered should submit their papers this year. Papers should be submitted via e-mail to Manager, Southern Historical Association no later than October 9, 2020. The paper should be no longer than fifteen pages of text and must be in the same form as will be delivered at the annual meeting. Each entry should have a cover sheet, which includes the author's name, the paper title, and the institution for the Ph.D. with the expected month/year of graduation, or the month/year when the Ph.D. was received. A committee appointed by the president of the SHA will choose the winning paper, which will be announced at the annual meeting and its author presented with a cash award.

2020 Award Committee

Elizabeth Herbin-Triant, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Chair
Adam Domby, College of Charleston
Bertis English, Alabama State University

Past Winners

2019 - Lucas Kelley
“'We Will Mark a Line for the White People': Creating and Enforcing Borders in the Tennessee and Cumberland River Valleys"

2018 - John Bardes
"The Problem of Incarceration in the Age of Slavery: Penology, Race, and Free Status in New Orleans’s Slave Prisons"

2017 - Justin Randolph
"Incarceration Summer, 1964: the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol and the Roots of Rural Mass Incarceration"

2016 - Jonathan Lande
"Deserting Freedom: African American Runaways in the Union Army"

2015 - Jeremy B. Zallen
"Dungeons and Dragons: Slavery, Industry, and Modernity in Antebellum Coal-Gas Mines"

2014 - Paul Mokrzycki
"Green Ribbons, White Flight, Black Bodies: Race, Region, and the Atlanta Youth Murders"

2013 - Alix Lerner
"Discarded Chattel: Old Slaves, Public Resources, and the Legal Complexities of Burdensome Property"

2012 - Scott Huffard
"Creating the 'Main Line of Mid-America': The Illinois Central Railroad in the South, 1878-1888"

2011 - Jennifer Oast
"An Education in Oppression: Students, Slaves, and Violence on Virginia College Campuses"

2010 - Joseph Abel
"'Our Grievance Procedure Operates on Facts, Not Color': White Unions and Black Workers in the Aircraft Industry of Texas"

2009 - Ben Schiller
"Selling Themselves: Slavery, Self-Promotion and the Path of Least Resistance"

2008 - Robert E. Luckett
"Ole Miss and Radical Reconstruction From James Silver to the Meredith Movement"

2007 - David Silkenat
"'By His Own Hand': Suicide in Nineteenth Century North Carolina"

2006 - Benjamin E. Wise
"Traveling South: Will Percy in the World"

2005 - Chandra Manning
"Voting with their Fear: Confederate Soldiers and the 1864 North Carolina Governor's Election"

2004 - Edward Rugemer
"Robert Monroe Harrison, British Abolition, Southern Anglophobia and Texas Annexation"

2003 - Judkin Browning
"Conflicting Visions of Freedom and Civilization: Forging New Identities in Beaufort, NC, during the Civil War"

2002 - Bethany L. Johnson
"'To Understand the South as She Was': The Southern History Association and the Troubled Transition to Scientific History, 1896-1907"

2001 - Gavin James Campbell
"'A Pure and Persistent Anglo-Saxon Lineage': Race and Old Time Fiddling in Atlanta, 1913-1925"

2000 - Scott Stephan
"Re-Creating Conversion: An Examination of Domestic Devotion in the Old South"