Timothy S. Huebner

Timothy S. Huebner (born 1966) is an American historian who focuses on the history of the American South, the U.S. Constitution, American slavery, the American Civil War, and the Reconstruction Era. Since 2002, he has been director of the Rhodes College Institute of Regional Studies in Tennessee. As of 2023, he chairs the editorial board of the Journal of Supreme Court History. Popular media articles have examined John Marshall Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the history of the judicial-selection laws in Tennessee, 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. In 2016 he wrote a New York Times piece about the history of Supreme Court Justice nominations in election years.

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. He has won the James M. Jones Award for Outstanding Faculty Service, He is also an associate provost in the office of academic affairs.

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. His thesis was on "Law and Gospel: Evangelicalism and the jurisprudence of Joseph Henry Lumpkin, 1799–1867." He started teaching at Rhodes around 1995. In September 2012 he gave a presentation on "Lincoln and the Constitution" that is preserved at the Tennessee Digital Commons. 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. He was awarded the 2024 John T. Hubbell Prize for best article published in the journal Civil War History, for his work on the slave-trading career of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Confederate markers

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 Forrest's slave pen was right next door. 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. 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.

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Articles