History professor wins Hubbell Prize

The Kent State University Press recently named Albion College history professor Marcy Sacks winner of the 2025 John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article published in Civil War History in the past year. 

Sacks, the Julian S. Rammelkamp Professor of History at Albion College, was cited for her article “‘I Shall Forward to You My Contraband: Tracing Coerced Wartime Black Movement North through an Incomplete Archive,” which appeared in the December 2024  issue. The article examined formerly enslaved people involuntarily relocated to the North during the Civil War. Contest judges called it an important work of archival recovery in revealing this dark undercurrent that accompanied the Civil War’s new birth of freedom. 

“In exploring the ways in which U.S. soldiers sought to extract people from the South and send them to friends and family in non-slaveholding states, Sacks provides a searing demonstration of the allure of mastery for some U.S. soldiers and the steps they would take to secure servants,” contest judges wrote. “She further exposes soldiers’ hypocrisies when they then congratulated themselves as emancipators even as they treated people as possessions.”

Sacks said the article is part of a larger project examining white northerners’ views of race and slavery during the Civil War. 

“I am exploring the ways in which white northerners and Black southerners interacted during the war and how those interactions shaped whites’ ideas about race,” she said. “While some of those encounters helped to ameliorate whites’ racist views, more often I have found the opposite.”