Timothy S. Huebner

Huebner's book Liberty and Union examines the public perception of the U.S. Constitution during the American Civil War; how concerns over entitlements motivated Confederates to abandon the U.S. Constitution in order to enshrine their rights to slavery, how Union soldiers perceived themselves as defending a "uniquely American experiment in constitutional liberty," and how African-American abolitionists set the stage for a "constitutional revolution."[3] Popular media articles have examined John Marshall Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson,[4] the history of the judicial-selection laws in Tennessee,[5] and episodes of local history, like the Memphis Riot of 1866 and the racially charged murders of three friends of anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells, that lacked commemoration.[6] In 2016 he wrote a New York Times piece about the history of Supreme Court Justice nominations in election years.[7]

Huebner chairs the history department at Rhodes College in Tennessee and is the author of several non-fiction history books. C-SPAN has broadcast several of his lectures.[8] He has won the James M. Jones Award for Outstanding Faculty Service,[2] the Rhodes College Clarence Day Award for Teaching and in 2005 was chosen as Tennessee Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.[9] He is also an associate provost in the office of academic affairs.[10]

Huebner received a B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of Miami and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Florida.[11] His thesis was on "Law and Gospel: Evangelicalism and the jurisprudence of Joseph Henry Lumpkin, 1799–1867." He started teaching at Rhodes around 1995.[12] In September 2012 he gave a presentation on "Lincoln and the Constitution" that is preserved at the Tennessee Digital Commons.[13] In 2014 he lectured at the U.S. Supreme Court, before the Supreme Court Historical Society, on the history of the Taney court and how Roger B. Taney still influenced American civil-rights law in the immediate wake of his death, which occurred in the waning days of the American Civil War.[14]

Primarily a legal historian with a focus on the Southern judiciary, Huebner has been involved in reexamining Confederate mythology, markers and monuments in the South, such as a historic marker that identified the location of Nathan Bedford Forrest's personal residence while failing to mention that his slave pen was right next door.[15] A supplementary marker that described Forrest's involvement in the domestic slave trade and his advocacy for reopening the transatlantic slave trade was erected in 2018 and vandalized in 2020.[16] One 2019 letter-to-the-editor in response to the marker called Huebner a "revisionist historian" and advocated instead for marker that honored Nathan Bedford Forrest as "Memphis' first Civil Rights activist" for his 1875 speech to the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association.[17]

• The Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790-1890. Studies in the Legal History of the South. University of Georgia Press. 2011. ISBN 9-780-8203-3236-9.
• The Taney Court: Justice, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO. 2003. ISBN 9781576073681.
• Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism. University Press of Kansas. 2016. ISBN 9780700622696. OCLC 928490441.[18]

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