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.