Past & Present Author Samantha Payne Wins a 2023 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Prize
by the Past & Present editorial team Past and Present was pleased to learn that Dr. Samantha Payne (College of Charleston) has won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians “article prize for 2022 for an article in any field of history by a woman scholar”. The award was made for her article “‘A General Insurrection in the Countries with Slaves’: The US Civil War and the Origins of an Atlantic Revolution, 1861–1866” which was published in Past & Present no. 257 (November 2022). The prize committee noted that: “Payne foregrounds the actions of enslaved people in the debate about emancipation following the American Civil War and its ripple effects on the other slave states of the Americas. She argues the end of the Civil War precipitated the abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil because of the actions of these slaves. Members of the Committee were impressed by the breadth of her research, with archives in several countries and multiple languages. By considering the communications network that existed among enslaved people and free people of color in the Atlantic world, she was able to consider how much their participation of affected the changing discourse of emancipation By reading across the […]