Museum Announces Winners of 2008 Book Awards

The Museum of the Confederacy is pleased to announce that Joseph T. Glatthaar’s General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse, published by Free Press, and Charles W. Mitchell’s Maryland Voices of the Civil War, published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, are the recipients of its 39th annual Book Awards competition.

Glatthaar receives the 2008 Jefferson Davis Award as the outstanding narrative work on the origins, life, and legacies of the Confederacy and the Confederate period. Mitchell receives the 2007-2008 Founders Award given for excellence in the editing of primary source documents related to the Confederate period. Both awards are administered by The Museum of the Confederacy and decided by independent judging panels composed of leading scholars.

The Davis Award judges praised General Lee’s Army as “a deeply researched study [that] brilliantly weaves together an account of the Army of Northern Virginia’s accomplishments on the battlefield, an insightful analysis of its administrative operations, and a vivid portrait of the lives and attitudes of its soldiers. It acknowledges Lee and his army’s contribution to Confederate nationalism as well as the commitment and sacrifices of its officers and enlisted men without surrendering to a nostalgic view of Lee’s army as a noble band of brothers. A delight to read, Glatthaar’s book will endure as a central study of the Confederacy and the Civil War.” Glatthaar, Stephenson Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, won the Davis Award in 1985 for his first book, Sherman’s March and Beyond.

The judges also named Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, published by Cambridge University Press, as a finalist for the award.

The Founders Award judges praised Mitchell’s Maryland Voices of the Civil War as an “imaginative and even innovative” work and an “exceptional synthesis of a vast number of disparate sources into a narrative account of Maryland during the Civil War” a subject that is “overlooked and understudied.” Charles Mitchell is a writer and historian and a native of Maryland, “by birth and by choice.”

The Founders Award judges named three other finalists for the award: Peter A. Brown’s Take Sides with the Truth: The Postwar Letters of John Singleton Mosby to Samuel F. Chapman , published by University Press of Kentucky; Jennifer W. Ford’s The Hour of Our Nation’s Agony: The Civil War Letters of Lt. William Cowper Nelson of Mississippi (Voices Of The Civil War), published by University of Tennessee Press; and David W. Lowe’s Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman (Civil War in the North), published by Kent State University Press. The judges also cited for “honorable mention” volume 12 of the ongoing series (recipient of three previous Founders Awards) The Papers of Jefferson Davis, edited by Lynda L. Crist, et. al., and published by Louisiana State University Press.

For more information on the Museum’s Book Awards program and a list of previous winners, see the Programs section of the website, http://www.moc.org/.