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Congratulations to Andrew Lang – Winner of the 2018 Tom Watson Brown Book Award!

Congratulations to Andrew Lang – Winner of the 2018 Tom Watson Brown Book Award!

The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson–Brown Foundation are proud to announce that Andrew Lang is the recipient of the Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Lang, Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi State University, earned the award for In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America, which was published in 2017 by the Louisiana State University Press. The $50,000 award is funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation in honor of the broadcaster, philanthropist, and Civil War enthusiast Tom Watson Brown. The prize committee praised the book as “one of the very best examples of a social-cultural history of the army to be done for the Civil War,” one that “makes good use of cultural, social, and political history, as well as military theory.” In the Wake of War examines American military occupations from the U.S.-Mexican War through the Civil War and Reconstruction from the perspective of the occupying troops. It argues that the volunteers of the Civil War era typically perceived occupation duty as antithetical to their republican values as citizen-soldiers. Lang painstakingly shows how such duty forced soldiers to confront a host of critical problems in this period, such as the relationship between citizen and government, the complications of race and emancipation in a white democracy, and the intricate negotiation of gender roles in occupied communities, to name just a few. The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation will present the Tom Watson Brown Book Prize to Dr. Lang at the Southern Historical Association’s annual meeting in Birmingham, Alabama in November.

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