TIMOTHY S. HUEBNER is the winner of the 2024 John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article published in Civil War History in the past year. Huebner’s “Taking Profits, Making Myths: The Slave Trading Career of Nathan Bedford Forrest” is a masterpiece of scholarship that provides a definitive account of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s slave trading business before the Civil War and how and why he and his apologists tried so hard to downplay it for decades after. Huebner’s exhaustively researched and richly textured account reveals Forrest to have been an aggressive, large-scale trafficker in human beings whose Memphis operations in the 1850s expanded to among the largest and most lucrative in the South. Piecing together fragments of evidence about Forrest’s slave dealing, including from descendants of those he trafficked, Huebner’s research located the sites of Forrest’s operations in Memphis and led to a wider reckoning with this history in the city.

Read an interview with Timothy S. Huebner.

PRIZE SELECTION COMMITTEE MEMBERS
William G. Thomas III, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Douglas Egerton, Le Moyne College
Susan O’Donovan, University of Memphis

TIMOTHY S. HUEBNER is provost and vice president for Academic Affairs and professor of history at Rhodes College. He is the author or editor of four books, including Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism (2016). He has delivered invited lectures at the US Supreme Court, the National Constitutional Center, and the American Civil War Museum. His essays, reviews, and op-ed pieces have appeared in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, SCOTUSblog, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. He served as chair of the board of editors of the Journal of Supreme Court History. 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 thirty-five years. The winner is determined by the journal’s prize selection committee, and the prize earns the recipient a $1,000 award from The Kent State University Press.