Summersell Center Announces Winner of 2020 Summersell Prize

This is the dust jacket for Sisters and Rebels. It is read with white lettering.

The Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South and the Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History at The University of Alabama are proud to announce the winner of the 2020 Summersell Prize for the best book on the history of the American South: Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America (W.W. Norton, 2019) by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall.

Sisters and Rebels is a masterful study of the three “estranged yet forever entangled” Lumpkin sisters as they wrestled with the complicated legacies of white supremacy, radical politics, and sisterhood in the early twentieth century. Forged through decades of research, the family’s private papers, and interviews with Katharine and Grace Lumpkin, Sisters and Rebels is a sweeping narrative of the reconfiguration of race, gender, and class within the American South.

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is currently the Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The winner was chosen by the Deep South Book Prize committee: Kari Frederickson, John Giggie, and Lesley Gordon; the award includes a $5000 prize and an invitation to deliver an address about the book at The University of Alabama.