Tag Archives: hines prize

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Hines Prize 2015

Posted on by

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.

 

Dr. Tristan Stubbs lectures in Addlestone Library

Posted on by

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.