Adam H. Domby has won the John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article published in Civil War History during 2017. His study, “Captives of Memory:  Contested Legacy of Race at Andersonville National Historic Site,” Civil War History (September 2017), was selected by the journal’s editorial advisory board. The prize earns the recipient a $1,000 award from The Kent State University Press.

His article examines competing memories of Andersonville Prison from 1865 to the present by tracing the role of race and racial conflict in shaping how Andersonville has been remembered. White southerners’ postwar attempts to reinterpret and erase the site’s divisive legacy met with resistance, not only from former white prisoners, but also from African Americans. The ways in which African Americans remembered the site and utilized the prison grounds in their fights for freedom and civil rights has largely been overlooked by historians. These contestations over memory helped shape the Park Service’s present interpretation of Andersonville National Historic Site. Today, Andersonville functions as a shrine to the patriotic suffering of POWs instead of as a memorial to atrocity. But this celebration of sacrifice comes at the expense of some aspects of Andersonville’s unique history.

Adam H. Domby is an assistant professor of history at the College of Charleston. He is currently completing a book entitled The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory, and has begun work on a new study about the lasting legacies of wartime conflict within southern communities.

Now in its 64th year of publication, Civil War History is published quarterly by The Kent State University Press. Edited by Brian Craig Miller (Mission College) and associate editor Frank Towers (University of Calgary), it is the premier journal in the study of the American Civil War.

Awarded annually by The Kent State University Press, the John T. Hubbell Prize recognizes the extraordinary contribution to the field of its namesake, who served as editor of Civil War History for 35 years.