About the Prize
The Center for Civil War Research established the Wiley-Silver Prize in Civil War History in 2011. The Center presents the prize to the best first book, thereby recognizing and encouraging new and emerging scholars in the history of the American Civil War. The prize is named for two distinguished former members of the University's History Department faculty, Bell Irvin Wiley and James W. Silver.
Scholars awarded the prize receive an invitation to the University's annual Conference on the Civil War, held in October. At that meeting, the prize and $2000 is awarded to the honoree. In addition to press releases, the Center also purchases advertising space in the field's two journals, Civil War History and The Journal of the Civil War Era to announce the winning entry.
Wiley-Silver Prize Winners
2024
Frank J. Cirillo, for The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union (Louisiana State University Press). Dr. Cirillo is a historian of slavery and antislavery in the nineteenth-century United States and has held positions at the University of Bonn, The New School, and the University of Virginia.
The prize committee praised Dr. Cirillo's book as follows: "In an extraordinarily nuanced and well-written analysis of abolitionists, Frank J. Cirillo’s The Abolitionists Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union assessed how these men and women acted during the war that ended slavery. Even the abolitionists who had fought so hard to end slavery had to recalibrate their assumptions and expectations on how to achieve their goals amidst the unprecedented transformations wrought by a massive war. In this ambitious study, Cirillo found that these ideologues, specifically those who had advocated for the immediate end of slavery, divided on the verge of achieving their most dearly held ambition. On the one hand, some of these men and women continued their allegiance to immediate and radical action to end slavery to ensure America’s moral redemption. Those who stayed true to immediatism rejected political maneuvering because they believed achieving abolition by political means corrupted their movement. On the other hand, some immediatists joined the political fray and supported the Republican Party to achieve their purpose. These interventionists were willing to sacrifice the purity of their movement to ensure slavery's end. Cirillo argues that the unrepentant immediatists' predictions came true; interventionists’ political allegiances resulted in their sacrifice of racial justice because they had identified their movement with the Republican Party and its limited vision of emancipation, which rejected both the need for white redemption and black equality. Lincoln understood the reason for this realignment when, in the Second Inaugural Address, he asserted, 'Neither [side] anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.' If the people most likely to support African American social, civil, and political rights embraced black freedom as defined by white racist partisans during this cataclysm, then the formerly enslaved had little chance of fully realizing the benefits of emancipation. This book contributes significantly to understanding the United States’ failure to make emancipation more meaningful despite the realization of immediatists' decades-long dedication to the slave's cause."
Wiley-Silver Prize Highlights
David K. Thomson and April Holm
David K. Thomson receives the 2023 Wiley-Silver Prize for "Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on Union."
John Neff and Barbara Gannon
Barbara Gannon receives the inaugural Wiley-Silver Prize in 2012 for "The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic."
Shauna Devine
Shauna Devine receives the 2015 Wiley-Silver Prize for "Learning from the Wounded, The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science."
John Neff and Glenn David Brasher
Glenn David Brasher receives the 2013 Wiley-Silver prize for "The Peninsula Campaign & the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom."
Bell Irvin Wiley and James W. Silver
Bell Irvin Wiley, born in 1906, joined the University of Mississippi's history department in 1938, where he worked until departing for military service in 1943. Wiley is renowned for his The Life of Johnny Reb (1943) and The Life of Billy Yank (1952), as well as a number of other influential works in Civil War and southern history. By the time of his death in 1980, Wiley had authored, co-authored, and edited 24 books while serving at universities such as the University of Southern Mississippi, Louisiana State University, and Emory University.
James W. Silver, born in 1907, served as a history professor at the University of Mississippi from 1936 to 1964, chairing the department from 1946 to 1957. Although Silver is best known for his influential Mississippi: The Closed Society (1964), Silver was also a historian of the Civil War. He is the author of Confederate Morale and Church Propaganda (1957) and A Life for the Confederacy (1959). Silver concluded his teaching career at Notre Dame.
Submitting Books for the Wiley-Silver Prize
CLOSED FOR 2023 COMPETITION
Eligibility
The Wiley-Silver Prize in Civil War History will be awarded annually to a scholar’s first book or monograph in Civil War history published in the previous year. For this competition, single-author books or monographs published by scholarly or popular presses in calendar year 2023 are eligible. Books or monographs published by scholarly or popular presses are eligible. Except in extraordinary circumstances, textbooks are not eligible, nor are anthologies or edited works. Works by authors who have previously published a book (on any topic) are not eligible.
How to Submit a Book
The Center and each prize committee member must receive one copy of the book by Friday, February 23, 2024. Entries may be submitted by publishers or authors. Each entry must be clearly labeled “Wiley-Silver Prize Entry.” If the book carries a copyright date different from the publication date, publishers must enclose a letter explaining the eligibility of the entry.
Results will be announced by August 1, 2024.
Send submissions to:
- Center for Civil War Research
Department of History
310 Bishop Hall
P.O. Box 1848
University, MS 38677 - Andrew Lang
Department of History
208 Allen Hall
Mailbox H
Mississippi State, MS 39762 - Barbara Gannon
11128 Cypress Leaf Dr.
Orlando, FL 32825 - Amy Murrell Taylor (Wiley-Silver Prize)
Department of History
1715 Patterson Office Tower
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506
