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/her/their Ph.D. within three years of the time of presentation). Papers should be submitted via e-mail to [email protected] no later than October 15, 2025. (Make sure to use Holmes Award in the subject line.) 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 include a cover sheet that includes the author's name, paper title, and Ph.D. institution, along with the month / year when the Ph.D. was / will be defended.

2025 Award Committee

2026 Award Committee

Michael Ross, University of Maryland
Amanda Kleintop, Elon University
Adriane Lentz-Smith, Duke University

Past Winners

2024 - Cassandra Jane Werking
“Enslaved, Freed, Free, and Freedom Deniers: Black Americans and Confederates Took Advantage of the International Borderlands"

2023 - Timothy Case
“Conservative Faces in Radical Spaces: Racial Uplift, Respectability, and Resistance in John Mitchell Jr.'s Woodlands Cemetery"

2022 - Tina Irvine
“'American Type and American Folk: Mountain Whites and the Redemption of Modern America, 1915-1929"

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 Renfro
"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"