Launch of the American Battlefield Trust Book Awards

This week the American Battlefield Trust got into the book awards game, announcing the “short list of finalists” for its first prize.

The award will go to “an outstanding published work focused on military history or a biography central to the nation's formative conflicts—the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.”

There are eleven finalists, which feels more like a long list to me. They were selected by a committee chaired by Gary W. Gallagher. The final selection will be made by a panel of expert judges, all history professors: James Kirby Martin, James McPherson, and Joan Waugh.

The honored titles about the Revolutionary War are:

• Friederike Baer, Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War (Oxford University Press)
• Ricardo A. Herrera, Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 (University of North Carolina Press)
• Mark Edward Lender, Fort Ticonderoga, The Last Campaigns: The War in the North, 1777–1783 (Westholme Publishing)
• Jack Warren, Freedom: The Enduring Importance of the American Revolution (Lyons Press)

Those on the U.S. Civil War are:

• David S. Hartwig, I Dread the Thought of the Place: The Battle of Antietam and the End of the Maryland Campaign (Johns Hopkins University Press)
• George Rable, Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War (Louisiana State University Press)
• Timothy B. Smith, Early Struggles for Vicksburg: The Mississippi Central Campaign and Chickasaw Bayou, October 25–December 31, 1862 (University of Kansas Press)
• Elizabeth Varon, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster)
• Victor Vignola, Contrasts in Command: The Battle of Fair Oaks, May 31–June 1, 1862 (Savas Beatie)
• Jeffry D. Wert, The Heart of Hell: The Soldiers’ Struggle for Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle (University of North Carolina Press)
• Ronald C. White, On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Random House)

(The number of nominees about each war may reflect the total of titles being published.)

The prize money, provided by “a generous donor,” will include $50,000 for the winning author and smaller amounts to two additionl finalists. The announcement will come in September.