Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award
Award Description
The Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award is given in recognition of a distinguished book in southern history published in even-numbered years and is awarded in odd-numbered years. For books published in 2024, the award will be made in St. Pete Beach in 2025. Presses should send books directly to committee members at the addresses listed below before March 1, 2025.
2025 Award Committee
Catherine Clinton (University of Texas, San Antonio)
Dept. of History, Univ. of Texas at San Antonio
One UTSA Circle
San Antonio, Texas 78249
Doug Egerton (LeMoyne University)
606 Churchill Court
Fayetteville, New York 13066-2566
United States
Jeffrey Ogbar (University of Connecticut)
University of Connecticut
American Studies Program, Unit 4103
Storrs, CT 06269
Past Winners
2023 - Christina Greene, Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment, University of North Carolina Press
2021 - Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World, University of Pennsylvania Press
2019 - Elizabeth McRae
Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, Oxford University Press, 2018
2017 - Greta de Jong
You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement, University of North Carolina Press, 2016
2015 - Gregory E. O'Malley
Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2014
2013 - Joshua Rothman
Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson, University of Georgia Press, 2012
2011 - Lorena S. Walsh
Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763, UNC Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2010
2009 - Annette Gordon-Reed
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, W.W. Norton, 2008
2007 - Raymond Arsenault
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, Oxford University Press, 2006
2005 - Michael O'Brien
Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860, University of North Carolina Press, 2004
2003 - Sharla Fett
Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations, University of North Carolina Press, 2002
2001 - Ronald Hoffman (in collaboration with) Sally D. Mason
Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500-1782, University of North Carolina Press, 2000
1999 - Ira Berlin (co-winner)
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Harvard University Press, 1998
1999 - Philip D. Morgan (co-winner)
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, University of North Carolina Press, 1998
1997 - Thomas D. Morris
Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860, University of North Carolina Press, 1996
1995 - Nancy MacLean
Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, Oxford University Press, 1994
1993 - Edward L. Ayers
Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, Oxford University Press, 1992
1991 - William W. Freehling
The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854, Oxford University Press, 1990
1989 - Eric Foner
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, Harper & Row, 1988
1987 - Gavin Wright
Old South New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War, Basic Book, Inc., 1986
1985 - Joel Williamson
The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation, Oxford University Press, 1984