The Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of East Tennessee History has selected Aaron D. Purcell as the winner of the 2006 McClung Award for his article, “A Damned Piece of Rascality: The Business of Slave Trading in Southern Appalachia.” Purcell’s article focuses on the slave-trading firm of Meek, Haynes and Company to demonstrate the important role that southern Appalachia played in the institution of slavery. Utilizing a variety of original documents and correspondence, Purcell shows that the company was active during the mid-1830s throughout East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and Eastern Kentucky, where they purchased slaves to sell for a profit in the lucrative markets of New Orleans and the Deep South. Their financial success, he maintains, was possible because of the well-developed overland routes, economic structures, and points of contact that existed throughout the region. In fact, he concludes that southern Appalachia functioned as a “pivotal region for the growing interregional slave trade and expanding southern markets.”
 
Aaron D. Purcell has served as University Archivist at the University of Tennessee since 2000. He will begin as Director of Special Collections at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the fall of 2007. Purcell holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Tennessee, and is the author of more than a dozen articles in history and archives journals. He is the author of a photographic history of the University of Tennessee and is working on a scholarly monograph that examines several early TVA employees who were accused of being communists.