The University of Alabama Press announces F. Evan Nooe as the recipient of the 2022 Anne B. & James B. McMillan Prize in Southern History for his book Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South. Nooe’s book offers a bold reconceptualization of how settler expansion and narratives of victimhood, honor, and revenge drove the conquest and erasure of the Native South and fed the emergence of a distinct white southern identity.
McMillan Prize committee member Lesley Gordon commended Nooe’s work, saying, “Aggression and Sufferings is a timely and insightful study of violence, memory, and the shaping of the historical narrative. Nooe convincingly demonstrates how white southerners found common cause in their self-depiction as honorable warriors and innocent victims—all the while relentlessly and brutally expelling Natives from their land.” Ingeniously flipping the anthropological model of coalescence onto a colonizing population, Aggression and Sufferings proceeds to reveal how a distinct nativist regional identity took root in the memorialization of this blood sacrifice, eventually flowering both into the Confederate mindset and its later iterations well through the twentieth century.
F. Evan Nooe is assistant professor of history and historian for the Native American Studies Center at the University of South Carolina Lancaster. He has published numerous journal articles and essays on Native American history, southern history, and violence in the South. His work has appeared in academic journals such as Ethnohistory, The Southern Quarterly, and Native South
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The UAP Faculty Editorial Board has awarded the Anne B. & James B. McMillan Prize annually since 1995 to the manuscript chosen as the Most Deserving in Alabama or Southern History or Culture. The McMillan prize was established to honor James B. McMillan, founding director of the University of Alabama Press, former chairman of the university’s English department, and a renowned dialectologist. It has recognized books on such diverse topics as civil rights, Alabama politics, Southern Baptists, the Native South, Alabama’s vernacular culture, regional archaeology, and constitutional law.
RECENT WINNERS OF THE ANNE B. & JAMES B. MCMILLAN PRIZE IN SOUTHERN HISTORY
2021 • Stacy I. Morgan and Yvonne Thomas Wells, Folk Art with a Difference: The Story Quilts of Yvonne Wells
2020 • Brooke Bauer, Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840
2019 • Steven Brown, Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces that Changed a Nation
2018 • Bryan C. Rindfleisch, George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America
2017 • B.J. Hollars, The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders
2016 • Martin T. Oliff, Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928
2015 • Edwin C. Bridges, Alabama: The Making of an American State
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