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.

The Business Journal gives us this in-depth interview of Joseph Lambert Jr., author of The Political Transformation of David Tod: Governing Ohio during the Height of the Civil War. 
“Tod, who supported Lincoln’s rival, the northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, now found himself supporting the cause of the Union as southern states seceded and formed the […]

Civil War Books and Authors looks at High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor by Edwin P. Rutan II.
“Edwin Rutan’s High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac is a thoughtful, compassionate, and convincing exploration of the perceptions and realities commonly attached to the men comprising the massive body of late-war Union […]

Colin Dekeersgieter, author of the new poetry collection Opium and Ambergris, speaks to Brink, the online literary publication.
“In the construction of a poem the writer sometimes wanders into a realization or a new sense of apprehension—moves from being apprehensive to apprehending. In the same breath, and I guess this is the point, it’s also where the […]

The Civil War Monitor online reviews High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor by Edwin P. Rutan II.
“High-Bounty Men breaks new ground and makes an historiographical intervention by reclaiming the honor of late-war recruits and refuting widely held claims regarding their honor and effectiveness as soldiers.”—Civil War Monitor
Read more…
Buy the book.

AOL.com highlights Light Enters the Grove Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park through Poetry, an anthology edited by Charles Malone, Carrie George and Jason Harris.
“The fragility, resilience and impermanence of nature flow through the book, and the majestic Northern Dusky Slug (“It’s been slugging along this way for millennia”) is given the same prominence as the majestic American […]

Don’t miss this informative interview with Edwin P. Rutan II, author of High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor. Hosted by Andrew Pace for New Books Network.
High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac offers a much-needed correction to the historical record, providing a more balanced assessment of the “high-bounty” replacements in the […]

Signal Akron interviews Charles Malone, Carrie George, and Jason Harris on their new poetry anthology Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park through Poetry.
“The Cuyahoga Valley National Park is home to hundreds of animal and plant species, from poison hemlock and American sweetgum trees to the eastern tiger swallowtail and the North American […]

Congratulations to J. Gregory Acken, winner of the Army Historical Foundation’s Distinguished Writing Awards for 2023. His book, Through Blood and Fire: The Civil War Letters of Major Charles J. Mills, 1862–1865, Revised and Expanded Edition, wins in the Reprint category.

“Charles G. Mills belongs alongside other Harvard-educated men who wrote perceptively about the American Civil War. He […]

Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) reviews The Lion’s Country: C. S. Lewis’s Theory of the Real by Charlie W. Starr.
“… a valuable contribution to Lewis studies. With engaging prose, Starr ably explains the difficult philosophical concepts behind Lewis’s fiction. Both scholars and general readers interested in Lewis should find this book appealing. This volume not only provides insight […]