Hubbell Prize Awarded
Robert Bonner has won the John T. Hubbell Prize for work published in Civil War History during 2005. His article, "Slavery, Confederate Diplomacy, and the Racialist Mission of Henry Hotze," was selected by a five-judge panel as the best one published in the journal for volume year fifty-one. The prize earns the recipient a $1,000 cash award.
Bonner's article focuses on the diplomatic mission of the Confederate propagandist Henry Hotze and the emergence of scientific racism in the nineteenth century. He concludes the Hotze's "commitment to racialism anticipated an early chapter of a darker, more modern story, when twentieth-century governments took up the nineteenth century's most pestilent ideas and implemented them with thoroughness and malice, until another global war marked their end."
Bonner is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. He is the author of Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton Univ. Press, 2002) and The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2006). He was recently awarded an American Antiquarian Society–National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in support of his current research project, "Crossings to Freedom: Fugitive Slaves and the Completion of American Liberty."
Awarded annually and funded by a donor through the Richards Civil War Era Center at Pennsylvania State University, 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.
