Huebner's bookLiberty 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 examinedJohn Marshall Harlan's dissent inPlessy v. Ferguson,[4] the history of the judicial-selection laws in Tennessee,[5] and episodes of local history, like theMemphis Riot of 1866 and the racially charged murders of three friends of anti-lynching campaignerIda B. Wells, that lacked commemoration.[6] In 2016 he wrote aNew York Times piece about the history of Supreme Court Justice nominations in election years.[7]
Huebner chairs the history department atRhodes 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 theUniversity of Miami and an M.A. and Ph.D. from theUniversity of Florida.[11] His thesis was on "Law and Gospel: Evangelicalism and the jurisprudence ofJoseph 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 theSupreme Court Historical Society, on the history of theTaney court and howRoger 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 ofNathan Bedford Forrest's personal residence while failing to mention thatForrest's 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 his1875 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.ISBN9-780-8203-3236-9.
The Taney Court: Justice, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO. 2003.ISBN9781576073681.
Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism. University Press of Kansas. 2016.ISBN9780700622696.OCLC928490441.[18]
Hall, Kermit L.; Huebner, Timothy S., eds. (2010).Major Problems in American Constitutional History. Major problems in American history. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.ISBN9780618543335.OCLC318869803.
Huebner, Timothy S. (2020). "Chapter 11: Black Constitutionalism and the Making of the Fourteenth Amendment". In Bond, Beverly Greene; O'Donovan, Susan Eva (eds.).Remembering the Memphis Massacre: An American Story. University of Georgia Press.ISBN9780820356495.
Huebner, Timothy S. (2015). "The Unjust Judge: Roger B. Taney, the Slave Power, and the Meaning of Emancipation".Journal of Supreme Court History.40 (249).
Huebner, Timothy S. (2023). "Taking Profits, Making Myths: The Slave Trading Career of Nathan Bedford Forrest".Civil War History.69:42–75.doi:10.1353/cwh.2023.0009.S2CID256599213.
Huebner, Timothy S. (1991). "Joseph Henry Lumpkin and Evangelical Reform in Georgia: Temperance, Education, and Industrialization, 1830-1860".The Georgia Historical Quarterly.75 (2):254–274.
Huebner, Timothy S. (1994). "The Consolidation of State Judicial Power: Spencer Roane, Virginia Legal Culture, and the Southern Judicial Tradition".The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.102 (1):47–72.
Huebner, Timothy S. (2015). "Emory Speer and Federal Enforcement of the Rights of African Americans, 1880–1910".American Journal of Legal History.55 (1):34–63.doi:10.1093/ajlh/55.1.34.
