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.