Emberton recognized by Southern historians

The Southern Association for Women Historians has awarded Carole Emberton, associate professor of history, its 2014 Willie Lee Rose Prize for the best book on Southern history written by a woman or women in 2013.

She was one of four scholars who received awards at the annual convention of the Southern Historical Association held in November in Atlanta.  The Rose prize carries a cash award of $750.

Recognized for her scholarship in post-Civil War culture and violence in the American South, Emberton was honored for her book “Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the South after the Civil War” (University of Chicago Press, 2013). The book merges studies of race and American manhood with an analysis of post-Civil War American politics to offer an unconventional insight into the violence of the Reconstruction era.

She currently is working on a study of ex-slaves’ historical memory of the war and emancipation tentatively titled “A Folk History of Freedom.”

The award Emberton received is named for Willie Lee Rose, a distinguished American historian and author whose multiple prize-winning book “Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment” was a finalist for the 1965 National Book Award. It chronicles a program begun during the Civil War that permitted former slaves to work land abandoned by plantation owners on South Carolina’s Sea Islands.

Rose, the author of several other books on slavery and race, contends that although the land was later returned to the plantation owners, Port Royal constituted a stage upon which a dress rehearsal for the South’s postwar era was acted out.