James A. Rawley Award

Award Description

The James A. Rawley Award is awarded to a distinguished book dealing with secession and/or the sectional crisis published over a two-year period. The award was given at the annual meeting in 2023 in Charlotte for a book published in 2021 or 2022. The award will be given again at the annual meeting in 2025 in St. Pete Beach for books published in 2023 or 2024. Copies should be mailed to the following committee members no later than March 1, 2025.

2025 Award Committee

Nicole Etcheson, Ball State University
Dept. of History, Ball State University
Muncie, Indiana 47306

Bruce Baker, Newcastle University
West Wing
Paxton House
Paxton, Berwickshire TD15 1SZ
United Kingdom

Salena Sanderfer Doss, Western Kentucky University
1906 College Heights Blvd., #21086
Western Kentucky University
Bowling Green, Kentucky 42101

Past Winners

2023 - John Suval
Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy, Oxford University Press

2021 - Michael Schoeppner
Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America, Cambridge University Press

2019 - R. J. M. Blackett
The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery, Cambridge University Press, 2018

2017 - Manisha Sinha
The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, Yale University Press, 2016

2015 - Michael Woods
Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States, Cambridge University Press, 2014

2013 - Andre Fleche
The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict, University of North Carolina Press, 2012

2011 - Stanley Harrold
Border War: Fighting over Slavery Before the Civil War, University of North Carolina Press, 2010

2009 - John Ashworth
Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic: The Coming of the Civil War, 1850-1861, Cambridge University Press, 2008

2007 - Eric H. Walter
William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War, University of North Carolina Press, 2006