The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) is awarding its Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters to Radford University Department of History Chair and Professor Sharon Roger Hepburn for her book, “Private No More: The Civil War Letters of John Lovejoy Murray, 102nd United States Colored Infantry.”
The prestigious Cohen Award is one of 23 publication awards MLA will present on Jan. 10, 2025, during the association’s annual convention in New Orleans.
Hepburn’s “Private No More” examines a collection of letters that African American soldier John Murray wrote to his mother during the Civil War. Those letters sat in a box for more than 150 years before Hepburn unearthed them at the National Archives and brought the soldier’s words back to life through her book, which University of Georgia Press published in 2023.
Through her work, Hepburn has accumulated an extensive collection of documents, including enlistment papers, pension files, census records, and letters written by and to the 1,642 soldiers in the regiment. The professor regularly involves students in her research and through hands-on, active participation in the newly created Center for Archives and Digital History.
The Cohen Award’s selection committee called the book “an engrossing collection” and said “Murray’s voice shines” through Hepburn’s attentive and meticulous writing and editing.
“We are ushered into the human dimensions, everyday burdens and mundanity of war through careful representation of language, experience and historical context,” the committee noted. “Murray’s compelling epistles on camp life, rations, duties, payment, sickness and waiting offer important, personal perspectives from one of the 40,000 African American soldiers who did not return from the American Civil War.”
Roughly 1,600 men served in the regiment with Murray over the course of its service, “and they all, collectively and individually, deserve a voice,” Hepburn said. “Their story, as with all the other African American soldiers, deserves to be told.
“As one of my students, certainly not the first, said this semester, ‘History is like a puzzle, and we are putting together the pieces.’ John Lovejoy Murray’s letters are one of those pieces, and the puzzle is a panorama of African American soldiers during the Civil War.”
The Cohen Award is named for author and scholar Morton Norton Cohen, who was a professor at City University of New York and best known for his studies and works on children’s author Lewis Carroll.
Hepburn said she is “honored to receive this award, although it really should go to John Lovejoy Murray as it was his words that led to the book. I was just the medium through which his letters came back to life.”
The Modern Language Association of America aims to “strengthen the study and teaching of languages and literature” and provide opportunities for its members to “share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy.”
Chad Osborne for Radford University
