We are delighted to announce that Robert K. D. Colby (CLAS '09) has won the 2025 John L. Nau III Book Prize in American Civil War Era History for his new book, An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South (Oxford University Press, 2024)! 

The 2025 Nau Book Prize committee, comprised of Amy Murrell Taylor, Jonathan Noyalas, and Luke Harlow, wrote in its report that: 

"Robert K.D. Colby’s An Unholy Traffic is a pathbreaking and engagingly written account of the ways in which the slave trade persisted throughout the Civil War and proved foundational to the life of the Confederacy. The domestic slave trade, and the relationship between slavery and capitalism, may be one of the most vibrant areas of historical inquiry in the last scholarly generation, but no historian until Colby has thoroughly extended that work into the Confederacy and the Civil War. Drawing from a deep well of archival research and closely attuned to a wide range of historical actors, Colby reveals the inner-workings of the trade as thousands of men, women, and children were bought and sold in the effort to keep slavery, and the Confederacy itself, alive. Colby exposes the contingencies of the Confederate project as it related to the actions of slave-trading citizens and offers a powerful counterargument to any lingering assumptions about waning Confederate nationalism. The slave trade served as a barometer of Confederate commitment and demonstrated the resolve and stubbornness of Confederate enslavers to the war’s bitter end. But it also, as Colby reveals with sparkling insight, contended with the equally powerful resolve of enslaved people to resist—and to make sure that the war ended in the triumph of Emancipation."

In addition to winning the Nau Book Prize, Unholy Traffic was also a finalist for the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize! 

Thank you to Amy Murrell Taylor, Jonathan Noyalas, and Luke Harlow for serving on our Book Prize committee, and congratulations to Robert Colby!