Dr. Timothy Huebner, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Rhodes College, is the 2024 recipient of the John T. Hubbell Prize for best article published in the past year in Civil War History. The awarded is presented annually by The Kent State University Press and the winner determined by the journal’s prize selection committee.
According to the announcement by The Kent State University Press, “Huebner’s ‘Taking Profits, Making Myths: The Slave Trading Career of Nathan Bedford Forrest’ is a masterpiece of scholarship that provides a definitive account of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s slave trading business before the Civil War and how and why he and his apologists tried so hard to downplay it for decades after . . . Piecing together fragments of evidence about Forrest’s slave dealing, including from descendants of those he trafficked, Huebner’s research located the sites of Forrest’s operations in Memphis and led to a wider reckoning with this history in the city.”
In 2018, Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis hosted a Service of Remembrance and Reconciliation to unveil a historic marker at the site of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s slave trade yard. The marker was developed and written by Huebner and his students to reveal the truth about Forrest. An existing marker had mentioned only that Forrest had a home at the site and that he became wealthy from his “business enterprises.” Students in Huebner’s Historical Methods course, through extensive research, unearthed some of the names of the enslaved persons sold by Forrest, and some of the names were read aloud during the service.
In a Kent State University interview about his award-winning research, Huebner said, “Doing such research—rooted in the primary sources and presented for a public audience—can help Americans to confront the difficult history that exists in all our communities. We just have to do the hard work of uncovering such stories and being willing to talk about them. There are thousands more markers to be erected and many more articles to be written.”
Huebner, who is also a professor of history, has been a member of the Rhodes faculty for more than 30 years. He is the author/editor of four books including Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism and The Taney Court: Justice, Rulings, and Legacy. He has served as chair of the board of editors of the Journal of Supreme Court History and delivered invited lectures at the U.S. Supreme Court, the National Constitutional Center, and the American Civil War Museum.
In recognition of Huebner’s scholarship and service, Rhodes has presented him with the Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Teaching, the Jameson Jones Award for Outstanding Service, and the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award.