The Organization of American Historians presented the annual Avery O. Craven Award to C. Wyatt Evans for The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy. I commented on this in a previous post and highly recommend it.
The Museum of the Confederacy presented the 2004 Jefferson Davis Award for outstanding narrative on the Confederate period to Richard Lowe’s, Walker’s Texas Division C.S.A.: Greyhounds of the Trans-Mississippi. This book is sitting on my shelf, but I haven’t had a chance to read it. The Founders Award for excellence in editing primary sources went to Lynda Crist of Rice University for Volume 11 of The Papers of Jefferson Davis.
The annual Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War scholarship was presented by the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War to Donald R. Shaffer for After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans. This is a well-researched study of black veterans. I’ve made extensive use of this book in my own work, esepcially the final chapter on memory, which not only explains why the black counter-narrative disappeared, but how black veterans worked to keep their war service alive on the national level.