A Mississippi State University faculty member has won one of the top awards for Civil War history books.
When MSU assistant professor of history Andrew Lang published his book “In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation and Civil War America” in 2017, he would have been content receiving a positive book review. However, he ended up receiving the $50,000 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. The award is given by the Watson-Brown Foundation and the Society of Civil War Historians to the author of the best book published in the previous year on the causes, conduct and effects of the Civil War. The prize considered more than 50 titles for the award. The Louisiana State University Press, which published Lang’s book, submitted it for consideration.
Lang said receiving the award came as a shock.
“It is one of the leading book awards for any Civil War historian on the national level,” Lang said. “For me, at least, it was the last thing I was expecting to receive this early on in my career. When
I published the book in December, the most I was hoping for was a positive book review in a scholarly journal.”
He said he considered it an honor to be added to the list of scholars to receive the award, calling the experience “humbling and overwhelming.”
The book is based on Lang’s dissertation, and focuses on the experiences of American soldiers in the occupied south in the aftermath of the war. The book starts with the Mexican-American War in the 1840s and goes through Reconstruction in the 1870s. In the book, Lang argues Americans serving in the occupations found the task of occupation to be problematic.
“It’s one thing to invade a nation and wage a successful war even to the point of victory, but it’s an entirely different task altogether to wage the peace and to secure lasting peace,” Lang said. “What makes it even more difficult in these contexts is that the United States Army in Mexico and in the Civil War largely used volunteer soldiers in the project of military occupation. I argue that for a volunteer soldier, the idea of working behind the lines, guarding civilians, managing government policy was such a far-cry from the imagined romantic image of serving on the field in battle.”
He said the idea for the book came from him looking for a dissertation topic on the subject of being a Civil War soldier, which hadn’t experienced a great deal of research. He also factored in current events.
“All of this was taking place in the late 2000’s, 2008, 2009, 2010, when the United States was experiencing really trying circumstances in the Middle East, seven, eight years into the Middle Eastern wars in which we’re trying to define what it means to win the peace, to negotiate the aftermath of invasion,” Lang said.
Lang also credited his own mentors and academic advisors, including John B. Boles, Ira Gruber, W. Caleb McDaniel and Richard Stoll at Rice University, as well as Gary W. Gallagher from the University of Virginia and T. Michael Parrish of Baylor University. While a student at Rice, Lang won two dissertation awards. In addition to master’s and doctoral degrees from Rice, Lang holds a bachelor’s and additional master’s from the University of North Texas.
“I’m just happy to contribute to a long-standing reputation of this university being a place to study the Civil War,” Lang said. “The rank of mid 19th century Civil War era scholars here goes back decades. I’m just happy to be among that long list.”