The Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program is pleased to announce the winner of the 2023 Rachel Hines Prize. This year’s winner is The Politics of Fugitive Slave Rendition and the Coming of the Civil War by Dr. Evan Turiano. Turiano received his Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2022. His dissertation, “‘Secession’s Moving Foundation’: Fugitive Slave Renditionand the Politics of American Slavery” also received the 2023 St. George Tucker Society Bradford-Delaney Dissertation Prize. He is currently the 2023 Walter O. Evans Fellow at Yale University, sponsored by the Beinecke Library and the Gilder Lehrman Center.
The Rachel Hines Prize is awarded to the best first book-manuscript relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World. The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program’s book series. Funded by a generous donation by retired professor, Dr. Sam Hines in honor of his mother, Rachel Hines, this award support early career scholars.
Dr. Caroline Grego, Visiting Assistant Professor, Queens University of Charlotte and 2021 Hines Prize Winner
We are proud to announce that the winner of our 2021 Hines Prize winner is Dr. Caroline Grego, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Queens University of Charlotte.
She received the prize for her manuscript, Hurricane of the New South: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Jim Crow LowCountry which is currently under contract with University of North Carolina Press.
The Hines Prize is awarded to the best first book-manuscript relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World. The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program’s book series. If you have a manuscript on a topic pertaining to the Carolina Lowcountry and/or Atlantic World, please send a copy to CLAW Director Sandra Slater slaters@cofc.edu before May 15, 2023. If you have graduate students with potential manuscripts that could contend for the Prize, please make sure that they know of this biennial opportunity.
The Hines Prize is awarded to the best first book manuscript relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World. The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program’s book series. If you have a manuscript on a topic pertaining to the Carolina Lowcountry and/or Atlantic World, please send a copy to CLAW Director Sandra Slater slaters@cofc.edu before May 15, 2021. If you have graduate students with potential manuscripts that could contend for the Prize, please make sure that they know of this biennial opportunity.
Left, former Dean Samuel Hines and right, Dr. Huw T. David
Dr. Huw T. David, Director of Development at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, was awarded the biennial Hines Prize by former Dean Sam Hines on Thursday, April 14th, for his manuscript, The Atlantic at Work: Britain and South Carolina’s Trading Networks, 1730 to 1790.
The prize, endowed by former College of Charleston Dean Samuel Hines, is awarded every other year for the best first manuscript on a topic relating to the Carolina Lowcountry and/or Atlantic World.
“David’s manuscript presents a compendious history of the trade relations between South Carolina and Great Britain in the eighteenth century, both in the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and immediately following the Revolution,” CLAW director Simon Lewis said.
David’s manuscript derives from his thesis at Oxford University, for which he used a collective biography of some two dozen “Carolina traders.” His study offers new insights into the political economy of Carolina trade with Great Britain and its impact on Atlantic politics in the era of the American Revolution. David’s study reveals how these men’s trading activity at first acted as a stabilizing force but from the 1760s on aggravated intra-imperial discord. After the Revolution, according to David, Carolinians exercised greater commercial discretion than contemporaries and historians have appreciated. David’s work thus challenges contentions of South Carolina’s continuing commercial subservience to British trading interests.
In the context of remarkably strong competition, with manuscripts on topics ranging from the Civil War to African and African American watermen, the Hines Prize committee praised David’s manuscript especially for its placing of the Lowcountry squarely at the center of Atlantic World geo-politics in the critical decades before, during, and immediately after American independence.
David works as a Development Officer at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. He has previously published a number of articles in academic journals and he has held visiting fellowships at institutions including the University of South Carolina and the Huntington Library, Los Angeles.
Following the presentation, Dr. David lead a faculty seminar which discussed the notion of “Transatlantic Absenteeism” in colonial South Carolina.
Announcement from College Today, article by Hannah Ashe
The College of Charleston’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) program’s biennial Hines Prize has been awarded to Huw T. David for his book-manuscript entitled The Atlantic at Work: Britain and South Carolina’s Trading Networks, c. 1730 to 1790.
The Hines Prize is awarded to the best first book relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World. The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program’s book series. If you have a manuscript on a topic pertaining to the Carolina Lowcountry and/or Atlantic World, please send a copy to CLAW Director Simon Lewis at lewiss@cofc.edu before May 15, 2015. If you have graduate students with potential manuscripts that could contend for the Prize, please make sure that they know of this biennial opportunity.
Previous winners of the Hines Prize are as follows:
2013 – Dr. Tristan Stubbs – The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia
2011 – Dr. Michael D. Thompson – In Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Life along Charleston’s Waterfront, 1783-1861
2009 – Barry Stiefel – Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History
2007 – T.J. Desch-Obi – Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World
2005 – Nicholas Michael Butler – Votaries of Apollo: The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766-1820
2003 – Bradford Wood – This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725-1775
The 2013 Hines Prize winner was Dr. Tristan Stubbs, who received the award for his dissertation manuscript The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. The study focuses on plantation overseers in eighteenth-century Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, subjects long-neglected in the historiography of American slavery. These men were the arbiters of violent punishment for many thousands of bondpeople. They represented not only the cruel régime imposed by slaveholders, but also the vicious authority of slave societies that designated the oversight system the first line of defense against enslaved resistance. Although violence was practiced and encouraged by plantation owners in the early years of the eighteenth century, the latter decades witnessed a shift in their attitudes. By late century, planters lambasted overseers for their intrinsic violence, their passionate tempers, and their universal barbarity towards slaves. As winner of the Hines Prize, Dr. Stubbs receives prize-money of $1000 as well as expedited publication by USC Press in their Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World series.
On Thursday, October 30, 2014, the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program continued the Wells Fargo Distinguished Public Lecture Series with a lecture by Dr. Tristan Stubbs. For his lecture Stubbs presented part of his research on the plantation overseers of eighteenth-century Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina. He described how the nineteenth-century view of overseers as capricious and brutal men can be traced back to the eighteenth century. Stubbs noted that attitudes towards overseers had not always been so harsh, and he argued that the idea of overseers as both brutal and often incompetent arose in the eighteenth century due to a number of factors, including a rising absenteeism among plantation owners and strains of Enlightenment thought. Stubbs, who received his PhD from Pembroke College, Cambridge, is quite the expert on the overseers of the eighteenth century, his manuscript on the subject having won the 2013 Hines Prize. The lecture had the honor of being attended by Dr. Sam Hines, who led the creation of the CLAW program and is the man behind the Hines Prize, named after Dr. Hines’ mother. Right before the lecture Dr. Hines presented Dr. Stubbs with a certificate confirming him as the 2013 Hines Prize winner. The Wells Fargo Distinguished Public Lecture series will continue on November 6th at 6 pm with a lecture given in the College of Charleston’s Jewish Studies Center by Dr. Ras Michael Brown, a professor from Southern Illinois University.
Dr. Tristan Stubbs, winner of the 2013 Hines Prize, will visit the College of Charleston at the end of October. While here he will lead a faculty seminar as well as a public presentation on plantation overseers. For more details on the October 30th presentation see the flyer below.
We are pleased to announce that the 2013 Hines Prize for the best first book on South Carolina or the Atlantic World has been awarded to Dr. Tristan Stubbs for his work, The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. Dr. Stubbs recently completed a PhD in American History at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, UK. Formerly, he lectured in American and Caribbean studies at the University of Sussex. He has been Gilder Lehrman Fellow at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Virginia Historical Society, and Lewis P. Jones Visiting Fellow at the University of South Carolina. His writing on historical and contemporary slavery, the history of ideas, agricultural history, the Atlantic slave trade, and gender history has appeared in journals, magazines, encyclopedias and online.
The study focuses on plantation overseers in eighteenth-century Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, subjects long-neglected in the historiography of American slavery. These men were the arbiters of violent punishment for many thousands of bondpeople. They represented not only the cruel régime imposed by slaveholders, but also the vicious authority of slave societies that designated the oversight system the first line of defence against enslaved resistance. Although violence was practised and encouraged by plantation owners in the early years of the eighteenth century, the latter decades witnessed a shift in their attitudes. By late century, planters lambasted overseers for their intrinsic violence, their passionate tempers, and their universal barbarity towards slaves.
In his acceptance of the prize, Dr. Stubbs wrote, “My principal aim was to uncover the reasons for the widespread vilification of overseers by the end of the 1700s. In addition to their reputation for violence, plantation overseers were also believed to be untrustworthy employees, morally dissolute supervisors, and incompetent agriculturists. I argue that these shifts in opinion grew out of far-reaching ideological and structural transformations to American slave societies during the Revolutionary era, not least the need to justify the survival of slavery in an ostensibly free republic.”
