Confederacy museum names book award recipients
RICHMOND, Va. –The Museum of the Confederacy has announced the recipients of its 43rd annual book awards.
The recipient of the biannual Founders Award for excellence in the editing of primary source documents on the origins, life and legacies of the Confederacy and the Civil War is Donald C. Pfanz, editor of The Letters of General Richard S. Ewell: Stonewall’s Successor. The book is part of the Voices of the Civil War series published by the University of Tennessee Press. Pfanz retired recently as Park Staff Historian at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park and is author of Richard S. Ewell: A Soldier’s Life (1998) and several other books.
The recipient of the Jefferson Davis Award for narrative works on the origins, life and legacies of the Confederacy and the Civil War is Dr. William J. Cooper, for We Have The War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861 published by Alfred A. Knopf. Cooper is Boyd Professor of History at the Louisiana State University. He has written and edited nearly a dozen books on Southern political history, including Jefferson Davis, American, which received the Museum’s 2000 Jefferson Davis Award.
The Jefferson Davis Award judges also named as finalist Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War by Megan Kate Nelson, published by the University of Georgia Press.
The Museum of the Confederacy created its literary award program in 1970. The awards consist of a framed certificate bearing a red wax seal made from the original Great Seal of the Confederacy, an artifact in the museum’s collections. The award recipients are decided by independent juries consisting of professional historians. The judges for the 2012 Jefferson Davis Award are Dr. Mark Grimsley, John Hennessy and Dr. Joan Waugh. The judges for the 2011-2012 Founders Award are Dr. Brian Wills, Dr. Richard Lowe and Dr. David Coles.
For information about the 2013 Jefferson Davis Award and the 2013-2014 Founders Award, contact Dr. John M. Coski at jcoski@moc.org or 804-649-1861, ext. 131.