The Richards Prize for the best article in each volume year of The Journal of the Civil War Era is named in honor of George and Ann Richards. In 2002, the Richards made a spectacular contribution to Penn State’s Civil War Era Center, the editorial home of the journal, which provided the Center with a permanent source of income to fund scholarly research and outreach programs that advance our understanding of the Civil War era. This journal has been one of the beneficiaries of their generosity. The editors of the journal created the $1,000 Richards Prize in 2011 to recognize George and Ann Richards not only for their contribution to the center that now bears their name, but also to recognize their contributions to Civil War era scholarship generally.
Congratulations to the Winner of the 2025 George and Ann Richards Prize
Amy Murrell Taylor has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2025. The article, “More Than a ‘Pile of Rude Boards’: Space, Power, and the Ordeal of a Schoolhouse in the Reconstruction South,” appeared in the June 2025 special issue, War Objects: Material Culture and New Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America, guest edited by Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts.
The prize committee praised the article as “a bold and powerful contribution to the literature of both material culture and Reconstruction,” stating that Taylor “brilliantly takes the notion of rebuilding after the war and makes it material and almost corporeal.”
They further noted, “By showing us how a single building could contain an entire town’s worth of functions… Taylor introduces readers to the tangled web of relationships that shaped Reconstruction on the ground.” The committee called the article “beautifully written” and “replete with evocative imagery that stays with you days after reading.”
Amy Murrell Taylor is the T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History and a Faculty Affiliate of the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (UNC Press, 2018), and a co-author, with Daina Ramey Berry, Joseph Crespino, and David Shi, of America: A Narrative History, 13th ed. (W.W. Norton, 2025). Taylor is currently serving as President of the Society for Civil War Historians in 2026-2028.
Awarded annually, the Richards Prize celebrates the generosity of George and Ann Richards, who were instrumental in the growth of the Richards Civil War Era Center and in the founding of The Journal of the Civil War Era. The journal is grateful for the service of this year’s prize committee: Anne Sarah Rubin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (chair); Elaine Frantz, Kent State University; and Antwain Hunter, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Past Winners
2024 – Guy Emerson Mount, “‘Shall I Go?’ Black Colonization in the Pacific, 1840-1914,” Volume 14 Number 4 (December)
2023 -Tian Xu, “Chinese Women and Habeas Corpus Hearings in California, 1857–1882,” Volume 13 Number 4 (December)
2022 – Kimberly Welch, “The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans,” Volume 12 Number 4 (December)
2021 – Cynthia Nicoletti, “William Henry Trescott: Pardon Broker,” Volume 11, Number 4 (December)
2020 – Catherine A. Jones, “The Trials of Mary Booth and the Post-Civil War Incarceration of African American Children,” Volume 10, Number 3 (September)
2019 – Caroline E. Janney, “Free to Go Where We Liked: The Army of Northern Virginia After Appomattox,” Volume 9, Number 1 (March)
2018 – Joshua A. Lynn, “A Manly Doughface: James Buchanan and the Sectional Politics of Gender,” Volume 8, Number 4 (December)
2017 – Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, “‘On Behalf of His Race and the Lemmon Slaves’: Louis Napoleon, Black Northern Legal Culture, and the Politics of Sectional Crisis,” Volume 7, Number 2 (June)
2016 – Mark E. Neely, Jr., “Guerrilla Warfare, Slavery, and the Hopes of the Confederacy,” Volume 6, Number 3 (September)
2015 – Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood, “‘We Do Not Care Particularly About the Skating Rinks’: African Americans Challenges to Racial Discrimination in Places of Public Accommodation in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Massachusetts,” Volume 5, Number 2 (June)
2014 – Ted Maris-Wolf, “‘Of Blood and Treasure’: Recaptive Africans the Politics of Slave Trade Suppression,” Volume 4, Number 1 (March)
2013 – Thavolia Glymph, “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” Volume 3, Number 4 (December)
2012 – Carole Emberton, “‘Only Murder Makes Men’: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” Volume 2, Number 3 (September)
2011 – Anne E. Marshall, “The 1906 Uncle Tom’s Cabin Law and the Politics of Race and Memory in Early Twentieth Century Kentucky,” Volume 1, Number 3 (September)
All winning articles are available in Project Muse. For more information, visit The Journal of the Civil War Era.