History Professor Shapes Literature of the Civil War

Michael B. Chesson, professor of history, has won the prestigious Founder's Award for his book Exile in Richmond: The Confederate Journal of Henri Garidel. The award is granted every two years by the Museum of the Confederacy in recognition of the best-edited work on the Civil War period. Chesson edited the work with colleague Dr. Leslie Jean Roberts, who provided translations for the journal, and they will be the first editorial pair to receive the award.

Judges for the award wrote: "The editors have made a significant contribution to the history of wartime Richmond, of the Confederacy as a whole, of the war, and of mid-nineteenth-century American social history" and predicted the "diary will become a classic addition to Civil War historiography."

The museum established the Founder's Award in 1970 as a biennial recognition of excellence in editing of primary sources pertaining to the Confederacy and the Civil War. Chesson is one of only two who have won both major awards from the museum, having received the Jefferson Davis Award for his published dissertation "Richmond After the War, 1865--1890" in 1981. The museum, located in Richmond, Virginia, maintains the world's most comprehensive collections of artifacts, manuscripts, and photographs from the Confederate States of America.

Chesson has also completed his third book, The Journal of a Civil War Surgeon, a compilation of extracts from letters written by Dr. J. Franklin Dyer to his wife during the Civil War. The journal offers a rare perspective on the Civil War as seen through the eyes of a surgeon at the front. The manuscript was provided by a former UMass Boston student Gerry Murphy, who did preliminary research on it as an independent study. Dorothy Armichetti, another student, also worked with Professor Chesson to help transcribe some of the letters onto disk. The book has been published by the University of Nebraska Press.

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