Hines Prize

The Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) Program biennially awards the Rachel Hines Prize for the best first book relating to any aspect of the history and life of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World.

The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program’s book series.

Funded by a generous donation by retired professor, Sam Hines in honor of his mother, Rachel Hines, this award supports early career scholars.

Previous Winners

2023—Evan Turiano – The Politics of Fugitive Slave Rendition and the Coming of the Civil War
2021—Caroline Grego- Hurricane of the New South: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Jim Crow LowCountry
2019—Andrew Johnson– Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of South Carolina, 1659–1739
2017—Michael Schoeppner- Regulating Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America
2015—Huw David – The Atlantic at Work: Britain and South Carolina’s Trading Networks, c. 1730 to 1790
2013—Tristan Stubbs – The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia
2011—Michael D. Thompson – In Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Life along Charleston’s Waterfront, 1783-1861
2009—Barry Stiefel – Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History
2007—T.J. Desch-Obi – Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World
2005—Nicholas Michael Butler – Votaries of Apollo: The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766-1820
2003—Bradford Wood – This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725-1775

Call for Submissions

If you have a manuscript on a topic pertaining to the Carolina Lowcountry and/or Atlantic World, please send a copy to CLAW Director Sandra Slater (slaters@cofc.edu) before May 15, 2025.

If you have graduate students with potential manuscripts that could contend for the Prize, please make sure that they know of this biennial opportunity.

Submit a Manuscript

Hines Prize Helps Put CLAW on the Map

Sam Hines (second from left) presents a gift to Simon Lewis, Sandra Slater and Timothy Johnson in support of the Hines Prize. In establishing the Prize, Hines sought to help promote the CLAW program by supporting new publications that focus on the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World.