From the Editor’s Desk: Award Winners

​The awards keep coming for Calvin Stovall. Last year Calvin’s Hidden Hospitality: Untold Stories of Black Hotel, Motel, and Resort Owners from the Pioneer Days to the Civil Rights Era (Brown Books) was nominated for a prestigious NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Literary Work category. Just last month we learned Hidden Hospitality was given the Literary Award for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation by the 2026 Black Caucus American Library Association. Calvin’s book is a trailblazing account of black hotel, restaurant, and resort owners who built businesses in the face of Jim Crow segregation, and in so doing built communities and legacies. Many readers may be familiar with the so-called Green Book publication which alerted black travelers to friendly establishments for rest and refreshment. Calvin’s book uncovered the stories of the people who ran those establishments as they fought racism, forged profitable enterprises, accrued political influence, and in many cases created centers for civil rights action and activism.

(Only later would I come to appreciate that I have a small connection to Calvin’s work: the husband of my current Daisy Lampkin biography project, William Lampkin, was a restaurateur and caterer in the Pittsburgh suburbs. Calvin’s work has opened up new lines of inquiry in my own.)
 
It was my honor to edit Hidden Hospitality, and it reminds me of several awards that the books I have worked on have won. Awards for anything are rare so it’s always worth celebrating high achievers:

​Ron Kirkwood’s “Tell Mother Not to Worry”: Soldier Stories from Gettysburg’s George Spangler Farm (Savas Beatie) won the 2025 Bachelder-Coddington Distinguished Book Award by the Robert E. Lee Civil War Roundtable of Central New Jersey. The Spangler farm was the site of two Union hospitals during the Battle of Gettysburg. It was thus also the site of unimaginable suffering, death, and misery. Ron examined endless battle, medical, and death records to tell the heartbreaking stories of select soldiers and their families. “Tell Mother Not to Worry” is actually the second book Ron has produced on the topic, a sequel to his well-received “Too Much for Human Endurance”: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg. “Tell Mother Not to Worry” is an achingly poignant reminder of the costs Americans endured to end slavery and preserve the Union.

​Derrick Lindow’s We Shall Conquer or Die: Partisan Warfare in 1862 Western Kentucky (Savas Beatie) is a fascinating account of irregular warfare on the Kentucky border which won the Wabash Literary Prize of the Indiana Civil War Roundtable in 2024. While we often think of the Civil War as pitting two great armies against each other, any number of Southern partisans—fighters who had not enlisted but grabbed their rifles and formed into irregular companies—took part in the fighting, sometimes for a season, often longer. Their efforts were often in vain, but not always so, and Derrick’s account of the fabled partisan leader Adam R. “Stovepipe” Johnson and his comrades shows the daring, resourceful, and often highly effectual side of those efforts. Derrick’s focus on partisan warfare also shines a welcome light on the uncertain political commitments of communities along the border. Even at the height of the bloodshed, many Americans remained uncommitted and confused, shifted their loyalties, and just wanted the war to be over.

​Richard W. Hatcher’s Thunder in the Harbor: Fort Sumter and the Civil War (Savas Beatie) won the 2024 Roberts Foundation Book Award. Thunder in the Harbor is of course an account of the initial salvo fired in the Civil War, but it is so much more than that. Richard offers a detailed account of the bombardment which initiated the Civil War, but he also offers forensic architectural analysis of the fort as it was built and developed to that time. Crucially, he also gives a thorough account of the post-Civil War history of the fort as it became a site of memory and memorialization. This is the history of a place through several eras, reminding readers that wars don’t stop once the shooting ceases.

​My own Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (Johns Hopkins), which I co-edited with Robert Cohen, was named an Outstanding Academic Title in 2014 by CHOICE Magazine. This was the first book I produced, and it collected articles about student activism in the 1960s in a region we often forget about. While their northern peers at Columbia and Michigan and Wisconsin protested the Vietnam War, marched, and famously occupied administration buildings, students in the south were no less active. Black and white students at universities and colleges throughout the region protested segregation, the war, and restrictive institutional legacies. They advocated for personal expression, sexual freedom, and for causes—liberal and conservative alike—in which they felt deeply invested. Some efforts were transitory, but for many students their days of protest set commitments that have endured a lifetime.

​I have a very strong suspicion that I will be needing to update this list several times in the coming months!
 
—David J. Snyder