Charles S. Sydnor Award

Award Description

The Charles S. Sydnor Award is given in recognition of a distinguished book in southern history published in odd-numbered years and awarded in even-numbered years. It will be awarded at the 2024 meeting in Kansas City, MO for a book published during 2023. Copies should be forwarded to the committee members no later than March 1, 2024.

2024 Award Committee

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chair
Department of History, CB #3195
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599

Beverly Bond, University of Memphis
201 Mitchell
University of Memphis
Memphis, TN 38152

Claudio Saunt, University of Georgia
Department of History 
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602

Past Winners

2022 - Warren Milteer, Jr.
Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South, University of North Carolina Press, 2021

2020 - Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America, W. W. Norton, 2019

2020 - Stephanie Rogers
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, Yale University Press, 2019

2018 - Julio Capó Jr.
Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940, University of North Carolina Press, 2017

2016 - Alison Collis Greene
No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta, Oxford University Press, 2015

2014 - Caroline E. Janney
Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation, University of North Carolina Press, 2013

2012 - Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement, Oxford University Press, 2011

2010 - Laura F. Edwards
The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South, University of North Carolina Press, 2009

2008 - Juliana Barr
Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands, University of North Carolina Press, 2007

2006 - W. Fitzhugh Brundage
The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory, Harvard University Press, 2005

2004 - Robert Korstad
Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South, University of North Carolina Press, 2003

2002 - Jack E. Davis
Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930, Louisiana State University Press, 2001

2000 - Claudio Saunt
A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816, Cambridge University Press, 1999

1998 - Neil Foley
The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, University of California Press, 1997

1996 - Stephanie McCurry
Masters of Small Worlds: Yeomen Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, Oxford University Press, 1995

1994 - Michael Honey
Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, University of Illinois Press, 1993

1992 - Charles Royster
The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991

1990 - Allen Tullos
Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont, University of North Carolina Press, 1989

1988 - Peter Kolchin
Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, Harvard University Press, 1987

1986 - James C. (Pete) Daniel
Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880, University of Illinois Press, 1985

1984 - Drew Gilpin Faust
James Henry Hammond and the Old South, A Design for Mastery, Louisiana State University Press, 1982

1982 - Bruce Palmer
Man Over Money: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism, University of North Carolina Press, 1980

1980 - Richard Beale Davis
Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763, University of Tennessee Press, 1978

1978 - Thomas C. Holt
Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction, University of Illinois Press, 1977

1976 - Edmund S. Morgan
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, W. W. Norton, 1975

1974 - Thomas B. Alexander
Anatomy of the Confederate Congress: A Study of the Influence of Member Characteristics on Legislative Voting Behavior, 1861-1865, Vanderbilt University Press, 1972

1972 - Allen W. Trelease
White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, Harper & Row, 1971

1970 - Sheldon Hackney
Populism to Progressivism in Alabama, Princeton University Press, 1969

1968 - George B. Tindall
The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945, Louisiana State University Press, 1967

1966 - Willie Lee Rose
Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964

1964 - Albert D. Kirwan
John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union, University of Kentucky Press, 1962

1962 - C. Vann Woodward
The Burden of Southern History, Louisiana State University Press, 1960

1960 - Dewey W. Grantham, Jr.
Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South, Louisiana State University Press, 1958

1958 - Arlin Turner
George W. Cable: A Biography, Duke University Press, 1956

1956 - Joseph H. Parks
General Edmund Kirby Smith, C.S.A., Louisiana State University Press, 1954