Thomas J. Brown is 2020 Winner of the Tom Watson Brown Book Award

The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation are proud to announce that Thomas J. Brown is the recipient of the Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Brown, Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, earned the award for Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America, published in 2019 by The University of North Carolina Press. The $50,000 award is funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation in honor of Tom Watson Brown, a dedicated student of the Civil War. Dr. Brown’s book is a sweeping analysis of Civil War monuments across the US erected between the 1860s and 1930s. It shows how these monuments moved Americans away from a wariness about warfare toward a national embrace of military values.  “Meticulously researched, cogently argued, and elegantly written,” explains the prize committee, “Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America fundamentally reconceives and enlivens the field of Civil War commemoration.”