Awards for Scholarly Distinction

In 1984 the Council of the AHA established an award entitled the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction. Each year a nominating jury recommends to the Council up to three names for the award, and the Council then selects up to three individuals from the list presented. Nominees are senior historians of the highest distinction in the historical profession who have spent the bulk of their professional careers in the United States. Previous awards have gone to Nettie Lee Benson, Woodrow Borah, Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Angie Debo, Helen G. Edmonds, Felix Gilbert, John Whitney Hall, Tulio Halperin-Donghi, H. Stuart Hughes, Margaret Atwood Judson, George F. Kennan, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Gerhart B. Ladner, Gerda Lerner, August Meier, Edmund Morgan, George L. Mosse, Robert O. Paxton, Earl Pomeroy, H. Leon Prather Sr., Benjamin Quarles, Edwin O. Reischauer, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Caroline Robbins, Carl E. Schorske, Benjamin I. Schwartz, Kenneth M. Setton, Kenneth M. Stampp, Chester G. Starr, Barbara and Stanley Stein, Lawrence Stone, Sylvia Thrupp Strayer, Merze Tate, Emma Lou Thornbrough, Brian Tierney , Eugen Weber, Gerhard Weinberg, and George R. Woolfolk.

Joining this distinguished list are Ramsay MacMullen (Yale Univ.), Arno J. Mayer (Princeton Univ.), and Robert V. Remini (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago). President-elect Wm. Roger Louis read the following citations at the General Meeting.

Ramsay MacMullen is the greatest historian of the Roman Empire alive today. It is proper, therefore, that he should be honored by the American Historical Association: If MacMullen has played the greatest role in assembling today's historical understanding of the Roman Empire, he has at the same time ensured the primacy of a historical understanding of it, turning the study of the first half millennium away from philology and toward historical inquiry. MacMullen has captured the Roman Empire from the Classicists and brought it as booty to us.

Because of MacMullen's work—12 books and dozens of articles, elegant in their style as well as profound in their scholarship—we think of Roman power as personal power, and are no longer convinced by depictions of the Roman state as a bureaucratic machine. We understand Roman social relations, not only how Roman insiders dealt with each other but also the ways the myriad outsiders in a mosaic empire became Roman, and not only how the powerful worked their will but also the ways in which women, peasants, and the lower classes were connected, influential, and despised. We comprehend how the corruption of these fundamental social relations contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. We see paganism as a vibrant religious system, its strength and its greatest weakness its incorporation of new cults and lack of institutionalized safeguards against them; we see Christianity as a religion whose spread, far from predestined as an enthusiastic religion in a world that dreamt of emotional meaning in religion, depended on the openness and de facto toleration of the pagan world.

His compelling and influential scholarship, his championing of historical methods and questions in a fought-over historical era, his appearance in the public realm as a scourge to politically motivated falsehood about antiquity, his exacting care for his teaching, his devotion to his students, his untiring administrative service to Yale, and now his indefatigable retirement, make Ramsay MacMullen an exemplum virtutis for the historical profession.

Arno J. Mayer was born in Luxembourg in 1926 and fled German-occupied Europe with his family in 1940. He served in the American army during World War II and was, most notably, assigned the duty of tending to Wernher von Braun after American forces took the German rocket scientist into custody. After military service, he studied at the Geneva Institut des Hautes Études Internationales and took a PhD in political science from Yale University, a discipline he left for history because he felt it was too subject to Cold War politics.

Arno Mayer's first book, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1817–1918 (1959; reissued as Wilson vs. Lenin, 1964), examined the diplomacy of war and peace aims during World War I in terms of domestic ideological alignments. While conservatives defended annexationist objectives to reinforce their domestic political position, two different strands of the "forces of movement"—Wilsonian-reformist and Leninist—competitively urged a "new diplomacy" and a renunciation of territorial gains. Mayer carried this theme forward in his magisterial sequel of 1967: Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles 1918–1919. Both these works generated intellectual excitement as they infused international history with an alternative perspective. Mayer developed his study of rightist elites and masses in several articles and in Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870–1956 (1971), then suggested further in his revisionist Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981) that traditional landed elites remained decisive in European society and politics until the First World War. Most controversially, in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (1988), Mayer attributed the "Judeocide" indirectly to the defensive reactions of Europe's elites as well as to Nazi anti-Semitism. His most recent study, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (2000), compares Jacobin and Bolshevik terror as part of the recurrent violence of the Left-Right struggle. All these works will continue to provoke debate, but have compelled a generation of students to engage with fundamental political issues.

Mayer taught initially at Brandeis and Harvard, then from 1961 until retirement in 1999 at Princeton University and for several years concurrently at Columbia. His students testify to his range, inspiration, and the concern he demonstrated for their own work, careers, and personal lives.

Combining meticulous research with engaging prose, Robert V. Remini has carved out a remarkable niche in American historical scholarship. Read by specialists and the general public alike, Remini's name is definitively linked with Andrew Jackson and his age. Beginning in 1963 with the publication of The Election of Andrew Jackson, Remini wrote 12 books on "Old Hickory," including Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845, winner of the 1984 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Written during the turbulence of the social movements in the last decades of the 20th century that reshaped the conception and construction of American history, Remini's balanced accounts of Jackson convey the flaws and limitations of the man while depicting a heroic figure. His more recent titles, including the best-selling The Battle of New Orleans (1999), continue the Remini tradition of measured analysis and spirited narrative. He has produced studies on the birth of modern partisan politics and profiled the lives of other political titans in the Jacksonian era: Martin van Buren, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay.

Currently professor of history emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, his academic home for four decades, Remini began his career at Fordham University in 1947 and remained there until 1965, earning a doctorate from Columbia University in 1951. He has taught at Wofford College and the Universities of Notre Dame, Richmond, and Jilin in the People's Republic of China. Remini has furthered the profession in various capacities, serving the American Historical Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Illinois Humanities Council.

The recipient of many tributes such as honorary degrees from Fordham, Governors State University, and Columbia College, Remini was presented the D.B. Hardeman Prize in 1998, the Carl Sandburg Award for Nonfiction in 1989, and the George Washington Medal of Honor in 1982; he delivered a Presidential Lecture at the White House in 1991. In his 80th year, Robert Remini has not slowed his scholarly pace. Books on Jackson's Indian Wars and on Joseph Smith will appear in 2001, and he is now preparing to write a biography of John C. Calhoun.

Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award

Established in 1986, the Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award recognizes outstanding teaching and advocacy for history teaching at two-year, four-year, and graduate colleges and universities, by commending an inspiring teacher whose pedagogical techniques and mastery of subject matter make a lasting impression and substantial difference to students of history. The prize is named for the late Eugene Asher who was for many years a leading advocate for history teaching. The Society for History Education (SHE) shares with the AHA sponsorship of the award. Members of the AHA and SHE submit nominations to the Committee on Teaching Prizes.

The 2000 honoree is Peter Frederick, who has taught history at Wabash College for 40 years. The citation read by President-elect Lewis quoted from nominees' letters of support: "Professor Frederick's teaching is innovative and multifaceted, grounded in the belief that students must 'connect prior learning experiences and current hopes and fears to the crucial intellectual constructs, ideas and themes of the courses' he teaches. His classes use many techniques to immerse students in historical issues, but the committee was especially impressed by his use of the power of story to help students connect their own lives to the American past. Professor Frederick's commitment to understanding how students learn has led to acknowledged expertise in collaborative and active learning and the use of stories in the classroom, which he brings to his teaching of American, Afro-American, and Native American history. The Association is pleased to honor this year a dedicated teacher of undergraduates."

Beveridge Family Teaching Award

Established in 1995, this prize honors the Beveridge family's long-standing commitment to the AHA and to K–12 teaching. Friends and family members endowed this award to recognize excellence and innovation in elementary, middle, and secondary school history teaching, including career contributions and specific initiatives. The individual can be recognized either for individual excellence in teaching or for an innovative initiative applicable to the entire field. It is offered on a two-cycle rotation: in even-numbered years, to an individual; in odd-numbered years, to a group. John (Chris) Butler who teaches world history at University High School, Urbana, Illinois, received the 2000 award. The Committee on Teaching Prizes citation stated, "John (Chris) Butler's students wrote that he 'combines innovative teaching techniques, humor, concern for students and a passion for history in his classes every day.' He has developed an innovative method of incorporating detailed flowcharts to help students mentally 'map' history, and has also created a series of role-playing and computer simulations, designed as problem solving exercises, for periods that range from Babylon to the age of steam. These and other innovative teaching methods are combined with a commitment to enriching student understanding of history and human values outside the classroom by participating with them in archaeology camps and taking them to rural Mississippi to build houses for Habitat for Humanity. Former students and colleagues write that he 'leaves his handprint on every Uni high student,' in the form of intellectual foundations and a passion for lifelong learning."

Gutenberg-e Prizes

Established in 1999 with a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gutenberg-e Prizes are for the best history dissertations in fields where the traditional monograph has become endangered (that is, difficult to publish because of declining sales). Each year, for three years, the AHA will award six prizes, each of which will consist of a $20,000 fellowship to be used by the prizewinning author for converting the dissertation into an electronic book of the highest quality, to be published by Columbia University Press. In 2000, the competition was for the field of Europe before 1800. The president-elect announced the following awards.

Gregory S. Brown (Univ. of Nevada at Las Vegas) for "A Field of Honor: The Cultural Politics of Playwriting in Eighteenth-Century France," Columbia University, 1997. This manuscript offers a multilevel study of the intellectual, social, and institutional contexts of dramatic authorship and the world of playwrights in 18th-century Paris. Brown interweaves research in archival and printed materials; case studies of individual authorial strategies; a rich, often contentious historiography on the French Enlightenment; and analytical constructs ("the civilizing process," "self fashioning," "the public sphere," "cultural capital") from contemporary cultural theory and criticism. Drawing on a sophisticated array of recent studies, the author positions his work against and between the grain of alternative approaches and interpretations. He combines scholarship on the history of the book with analyses of political culture and cultural identity. The reader comes away from the manuscript with a strong and revealing appreciation for the tensions and crosscurrents staged at the center of the 18th-century "republic of letters."

Mary Halavais (Sonoma State Univ.) for "Like Wheat to the Miller: Community, Convivencia, and the Construction of Morisco Identity in Sixteenth-Century Aragon," University of California at San Diego, 1997. Mary Halavais has reopened the question of the reality of convivencia in Aragon during the 16th century in a microhistorical examination of two villages, Báguena and Burbaguena, in the Jiloca valley. She argues, on the basis of notarial records, parish registers, and ecclesiastical archives, that in these villages local laity and religion made little distinction between old Christians and new (Moriscos). The distinctions were imposed, Halavais argues, from the outside by ecclesiastical authorities and royal agents. The dissertation is a good analysis of the sparse archival materials and the more abundant literature on 16th-century Spain. The thesis that the marginalization of Moriscos was imposed on localities by central authorities and that it did not grow out of antagonisms and hostility in the local communities themselves is revisionist and its interpretation will certainly be disputed. However, this is a creditable work that shows real promise and sensitivity.

Wayne Hanley (West Chester Univ.) for "The Genesis of Napoleonic Propaganda, 1796 to 1799," University of Missouri, 1998. The approach taken to Napoleon is novel, and that is quite remarkable, given the massive historiography on the subject. The author uses images as well as text to show the artful self-crafting on the part of a young provincial on the make. Using a term actually invented at or near the Revolution, the thesis makes propaganda into a key element in the rise of Napoleon. This gives the thesis a nice interfacing of cultural and political history that fits with recent approaches to the Revolution taken by Lynn Hunt, Carla Hesse, and others. The committee saw here the makings of a fine, short, first book and believes that the author should have the time to pursue its creation from the dissertation. The potential for the electronic publication format seems very strong here, and we would urge the author to consider how best to make the most of the digital possibilities for handling the wide range and volume of the materials on which his work is based. This could be a model project for electronically published cultural history.

Sarah Lowengard (independent scholar) for "Color Practices, Color Theories, and the Creation of Color in Objects: Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century," State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1999. Seldom does any dissertation attempt to be comparative, in this case to cross the Channel and to say new and interesting things about the scientific culture found in both England and France. By using color, as a practice as well as a branch of optical theory, the author manages to weave material culture along with abstract science—again an integration seldom found in a first work.

William F. MacLehose (independent scholar) for "'A Tender Age': Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries," Johns Hopkins University, 1999. William MacLehose takes the study of medieval childhood to a new level of sophistication by examining discourses that express anxieties about children and their susceptibility to external threats. None of these discursive fields directly and explicitly defines childhood. However, through a sensitive analysis of each, MacLehose is able to tease out a complex and multidimensional series of overlapping attitudes toward infants and children that goes far beyond the old debate of whether childhood existed in the Middle Ages. The strength of the dissertation lies first in the author's control of each discourse. He has mastered the complex literature on each of these very different areas in a thoroughly professional way. He understands the particular genre, terminology, and contextual issues that gave rise to each, rather than mixing them into a bland composite portrait. Moreover, he accepts the contradictions and paradoxes of the images of children within each discourse and across discourses. At the same time, he is able to argue convincingly for certain commonalities in perceptions and modes of discussion.

Michael S. Smith (Univ. of California at Riverside) for "Anti-Radical Expression: Counter-Revolutionary Thought in the Age of Revolution," University of California at Riverside, 1999. Reconstructing antirevolutionary ideology in the profile of British political culture at the end of the 18th century, Michael Smith's study steers a revisionary argument through the oppositions of a rich and complex historiography and a voluminous contemporary literature. English antiradicalism, Smith argues, shared a fairly coherent core of values and shifted tactically with circumstances, but one way or another, it was neither a form of reactionary Burkean conservatism nor a popularizing Toryism nor a still-hale survival from the English ancien régime. The dissertation's five chapters analyze antiradical discourse and tactics on major topics, from political reform to property, the church, and political philosophy. The committee was impressed by the work's cogency and challenge for a reconsideration of British political culture in the 18th and 19th centuries, by the wide-ranging but targeted research, and by the energy and verve of the presentation.

John O'Connor Film Award

In recognition of his exceptional role as a pioneer in both teaching and research regarding film and history, the American Historical Association established this award in honor of John E. O'Connor of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The award seeks to recognize outstanding interpretations of history through the medium of film or video. Essential elements are stimulation of thought, imaginative use of the media, effective presentation of information and ideas, sensitivity to modern scholarship, and accuracy. The production should encourage viewers to ask questions about historical interpretations as well as make a contribution to the understanding of history.

The eighth O'Connor Award was presented to Coming to Light: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians, 2000, directed by Anne Makepeace. The film was a coproduction of Anne Makepeace Productions, Inc., and WNET and is distributed by Bullfrog Films. The committee's citation stated, "Coming to Light recounts the photographic adventure of Edward Curtis as he tried to capture the religious practices, beliefs, and customs of the American Indians and published 20 volumes on them from 1906 to 1930. Curtis's stunning stills of the Hopi, Peigan, Navajo, Suqamish, Kwakiutl, and Ninuvak are shown along the way to present-day members of those communities, who comment on their meaning, sometimes in delight, sometimes in criticism. Photographs of the Peigan Sun Dance from decades ago alternate with photographs of today's Sun Dance, revived in part from Curtis's images. Curtis's own project emerges in all its contradictions, as he identifies passionately with what he considers a vanishing spirituality and yet seeks the support of banker J. P. Morgan; as he claims absolute authenticity for his photographs and yet in part stages them his own way. The faces of the Indian men, women, and children, shown and reshown in the film and speaking to us across the decades, are unforgettable. The committee commends Coming to Light for its sensitivity to text and historical context, and its ability to make competing historiographical arguments interesting to a mass audience."

Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award

In recognition of Nancy Lyman Roelker's role as a teacher, scholar, and committee member of the historical profession, and on the occasion of her 75th birthday, friends, colleagues, and former students established the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award. The annual award recognizes and encourages a special quality exemplified by Professor Roelker through the human component in her teaching of history.

Mentoring should encompass not only a belief in the value of the study of history but also a commitment to and a love of teaching it to students regardless of age or career goals. Advising is an essential component, but it also combines a consistent personal commitment by the mentor to the student as a person. Offering a human alternative, frequently in quiet and unacknowledged ways, mentors like Professor Roelker believe that the essence of history lies in its human scope. With this award, the American Historical Association attests to the special role of mentors to the future of the historical profession.

The award is given on a three-cycle rotation to graduate, undergraduate, and secondary school teacher mentors. The 2000 award—for graduate-level mentors—was given to Nell Irvin Painter. President-elect Louis read the following citation: "Nell Irvin Painter's career at the University of Pennsylvania, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Princeton University, where she is currently Edwards Professor of American History, meets and far exceeds the criteria for this award. Throughout her life in academia, she has consistently exemplified the important functions of a mentor: being forthright and supportive, engaging in a one-to-one partnership in learning, and being constructively critical as well as committed to the development of the entire student as an individual. Many of Professor Painter's students, now in the profession, spoke of her ability to make them envisage themselves as future historians, members of the academy. They also spoke of how difficult it would have been for them to achieve what they have without her assistance that did not end once they had graduated and left her direct care but continued as she mentored them on the job market and in their early appearances at professional meetings. Letters of support for Professor Painter spoke of a passion for her field, a passion for teaching, and a genuine passion for mentoring graduate students that went well beyond what can be expected of most individuals. Her inclusive view of history also makes her an ideal choice for this award—her writing is the history of inclusion, not exclusion. Professor Painter is a living example of what it means to be a mentor. She personifies the best characteristics of a mentor, thus inspiring a new generation of students to join the profession and enrich the lives of others."

Book Awards

At the annual meeting in Boston, the following prizes were announced for the year 2000. The committee's citations are recorded below:

Herbert Baxter Adams Prize

Daniel Lord Smail (Fordham Univ.) for Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Cornell University Press, 1999). This book is a case study of medieval Marseilles, about how people in that city thought about space, place, and identity. It is elegantly constructed, delightful to read, and graceful in its engagement with the works of others. The first part of the book shows immense methodological and conceptual sophistication; its central sections show a supple and powerful command of archives and argument alike; and its final chapter relates the case study to the larger issues of state formation and social development, and the meaning of the later medieval experience. The book will have a major impact and is a model for a first book.

Prize in Atlantic History

Karen Ordahl Kupperman (New York Univ.) for Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Cornell Univ. Press, 2000). This is an eloquent, highly original, and stimulating interpretation of the encounters between Native Americans and the English people in the first decades of contact and colonization. The author provides a nuanced and sensitive reading of the extant sources, simultaneously demonstrating a sophisticated and impressive understanding of the culture of the native peoples of the Atlantic coast. This outstanding book analyzes the ways in which these diverse Atlantic peoples understood the events that were taking place, the strategies they employed to deal with the changing circumstances, and the new understandings that emerged in the process. This balanced and informative work is certain to be of immense importance to all scholars and others interested in this complex, dynamic, and prolonged moment in the history of the European colonization of the Americas. It is a significant achievement.

George Louis Beer Prize

Marc Trachtenberg (Univ. of Pennsylvania) for A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–63 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1999). A Constructed Peace superbly analyzes, synthesizes, and re-presents the central issue of the early Cold War: how to accommodate Germany within a multipolar web of differing and contending powers—America, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the emerging West German Republic. By drawing on key archival and political documents from all parties, whose constantly shifting stances his book clearly articulates in a tour de force, and with a new emphasis on hitherto unilluminated key policy formulations, the author demonstrates a de facto but long-lasting peace settlement that achieved stability in a nuclear post–World War II age.

Albert J. Beveridge Award

Linda Gordon (New York Univ.) for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999). An account of the vicious battle over 40 Catholic, mostly Irish, orphans sent by nuns in New York to Mexican families in the Arizona Territory in 1904, this gripping social history imaginatively explores the social construction of race, the invention of whiteness, the subtleties of gender, and the politics of family values. The author beautifully weaves compelling narrative and nuanced analysis to reconstruct the world of copper mining and the southwest industrial frontier amidst a telling struggle over the "best interest of the child." Asking all the right questions, ever critical yet without special pleading, the author delivers on the promise of multicultural history.

Paul Birdsall Prize

Marc Trachtenberg (Univ. of Pennsylvania) for A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–63 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1999). A Constructed Peace is a major accomplishment, with immense scope and extensive use of archives in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany. It grapples with the great issue of the Cold War: how did the Cold War become a stable world order rather than an unstable prelude to global war? Arguably this is the most important book on the diplomatic history of the Cold War published in the last decade.

James Henry Breasted Prize

Warwick Ball (Stow, Galashiels, United Kingdom) for Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (Routledge, 2000). A comprehensive, challenging, and elegantly written book, Rome in the East synthesizes extensive historical, archaeological, and architectural scholarship. The book relies on the author's own considerable Near Eastern archaeological researches and reveals the multiple ways in which Roman influence spread to the East and the multiple ways in which Eastern influences spread to Rome, with Rome eventually transforming itself into more of an Eastern rather than a Western or European power. Surveying a vast number of places across the Near East and South Asia, this abundantly illustrated volume emphasizes the degree of commingling of military, political, and religious influences across vast areas touched by Roman hegemony and challenges conventional understandings of Rome's legacies, West and East.

John K. Fairbank Prize

Kenneth Pomeranz (Univ. of California at Irvine) for The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000). This pathbreaking study presents a strikingly original explanation of divergent trajectories of economic development across modern Eurasia. After demonstrating relative parity among the market economies in core areas of China, other parts of Asia, and western Europe as late as 1800, the author shows how Europeans exploited the New World to escape the ecological constraints limiting expansion elsewhere. He explains why China did not industrialize first, a vexing historical question for John Fairbank and many others. The Great Divergence offers critical insights into modern East Asian history and makes China part of world history, a double achievement honored with this award.

Herbert Feis Award

George Perkovich (W. Alton Jones Foundation) for India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (Univ. of California Press, 1999). In the tradition of Herbert Feis, George Perkovich's history of India's nuclear weapons program illuminates a previously neglected area of international relations. The book traces the evolution of nuclear policy in India from 1947, when the leaders of the newly independent nation first discussed the advantages of nuclear technology, to 1974, when India detonated what it ambiguously labeled "a peaceful nuclear device," and then to the spring of 1998, when the world's largest democracy detonated its first weapon. Drawing on archival research and interviews with participants as well as an exhaustive list of published sources, the author describes a nation struggling to transcend its colonial past and maintain its claim to global moral leadership. His book demonstrates that while interested in arms control, Indian leaders viewed nonproliferation policies developed in Washington, D.C., or at the U.N. as thinly veiled attempts to maintain the major powers' nuclear monopoly. Faced with a domestically popular program of nuclear development and an unwillingness on the part of the major powers to reduce their own nuclear stockpiles, Indian leaders eventually moved to develop atomic weapons. The author's book is a masterful essay on the complex origins of Indian policy and a sobering reminder that democratization and globalization require leadership and self-sacrifice from the major powers as well as newly emerging states. India's Nuclear Bomb teaches that new democracies will collaborate with major powers only if they are taken seriously and treated as partners.

Morris D. Forkosch Prize

Alexandra Walsham (Univ. of Exeter) for Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). This finely crafted study shows how the Calvinist doctrine of providence became the common property of all Protestants—conservative and evangelical, educated and illiterate, wealthy and indigent—in post-Reformation England. It also studies the various media by which providential ideas were diffused, revealing the interdependence of oral and print culture. The book possesses broad scholarly range, exploits a vast array of sources, and is written with exceptional clarity. It adds new dimensions to our understanding of early modern religious thought, the spread of Protestantism in England, and the interaction between popular and learned culture.

Leo Gershoy Award

Ruth MacKay (San Francisco, Calif.) for The Limits of Royal Authority: Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth-Century Castile (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). Ruth MacKay examines the logistics and especially the politics of military conscription in 17th-century Castile. The book is based on superb archival research, not just in the copious collections of the state archives but also in an array of local and municipal repositories. The author's findings illuminate two of the lingering mysteries of Spanish history: how a state seen as perpetually in "decline" retained the capacity to make war on a grand scale for decades longer than its financial and demographic weakness would predict and why the relentless demands of the monarchy amid the grim conditions of the 17th century did not lead to major popular revolt in Castile. The author persuasively links crown, cortes, and populace in shared "constitutional" notions, and she delineates politics at several levels that could encompass evasion and dissent without undermining royal authority or the basic loyalty of subjects. The Limits of Royal Authority makes a signal contribution to the historiography of Habsburg Spain and will be necessary reading for all students of the early modern monarchical state.

J. Franklin Jameson Award

Rolena Adorno (Yale Univ.) and Patrick Charles Pautz (Princeton Univ.) for Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, three volumes (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999). The editors have expertly transcribed, translated, and annotated this classic account of a Spaniard's encounter with North America in the early 1500s, and placed it in the broadest of contexts. Cabeza de Vaca's account comprises just one-fifth of this three-volume work. The remainder consists of a rich study of his time and place, an intergenerational biography of his family, a detailed analysis of his report, and an explanation of its genesis and reception up to the present day.

Joan Kelly Memorial Prize

Elizabeth Thompson (Univ. of Virginia) for Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (Columbia Univ. Press, 2000). From the crisis of paternity generated by the breakup of the Ottoman Empire through the construction first of a paternal republicanism and then of a colonial welfare state during the French Mandate, this history of gender and citizenship in Syria and Lebanon never loses sight of subaltern citizens and their struggles for empowerment. Grand in its sweep, bold in its theorizing, it demonstrates the centrality of gender for understanding fully the Middle East colonial experience.

Littleton-Griswold Prize

Gail Williams O'Brien (North Carolina State Univ.) for The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post–World War II South (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999). The Color of the Law is a model case study. It takes a particular incident—in this case, the near lynching of a black navy veteran in Tennessee in 1946—and from it builds an insightful analysis of the intersection of law and race in the United States. Drawing upon a vast array of materials, the author not only tells a compelling story of the aborted lynching, but also illuminates the changing and conflicted parameters of race relations, law enforcement, and legal culture in the postwar South.

J. Russell Major Prize

Daniel J. Sherman (Rice Univ.) for The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999). Based on detailed and original research in the archives and interpreted through a sophisticated application of current theoretical ideas, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France supplements and ultimately challenges much of the recent historiography on French identity after the First World War. While previous scholars have studied public monuments in France to argue that they evoked community and social ties, the author demonstrates convincingly through close study of local practice that monuments and other commemorative practices were successful, not because they found common ground, but because they embodied the tensions of their historical context. Thus, this book is a very significant revision of French nationalist narratives of commemoration, and it also has much to offer anyone interested in how commemorative practices work more generally.

Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize

Anthony Grafton (Princeton Univ.) for Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Harvard Univ. Press, 2000). Anthony Grafton's book highlights the cultural and social significance of Girolamo Cardano's work as an astrologer against the background of 16th-century natural philosophy. Cardano's contributions as mathematician, physician, and natural philosopher have been investigated by other scholars, but the author has chosen to focus on the significance of Cardano's astrology. Cardano's controversial career and the basis of his popularity emerge in a new light as a result of that choice. Central to both the career and popularity was Cardano's treatment of astrology as a discipline grounded in empirical observation. His approach transformed the abstruse practices of ancient astrology into an influential art that claimed intellectual legitimacy based on accurate factual observation and rigorous methodology. While the author eschews linking Cardano's astrological work to what we call the Scientific Revolution, his discussion clearly situates Cardano's astrology in the currents of empirical observation and rational inquiry that represented the cutting edge of 16th-century secular culture.

George L. Mosse Prize

Richard S. Wortman (Columbia Univ.) for Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy: From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II, volume 2 (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000). In this tour de force of historical research and imagination, Richard Wortman uses the instruments of cultural analysis to reshape our understanding of the central political institution of Russia's old regime. Having begun his richly detailed two-volume study of the monarchy as a symbolic system with the reign of Peter the Great, he examines the expressive arsenal through which successive monarchs communicated and enforced their authority. Showing how the Romanov tsars displayed themselves to the politically relevant public, he analyzes the symbols and myths that induced—or failed to induce—veneration, while transmitting particular values and styles of rule. Ceremony, costume, public monuments, aesthetic fashion—all provided the autocracy with a language of power that radiated from the center to the remotest village. Wortman does not, however, restrict his attention to outward display and visual representation, but uses newly accessible archival sources to penetrate the tsars' individual personalities, showing how the figure at the center of the political drama shaped its contours but was also restricted by the cultural context of his time. The study's second volume, devoted to the period 1860–1917, offers vivid portraits of the last three Romanovs as they contributed to the mounting catastrophe. It demonstrates how the repertoire of old-regime sovereignty to which they clung was ill suited to the increasingly modern demands of state, helping to undermine the authority of the very institutions it was designed to sustain. By illuminating in eloquent detail the workings of culture at the highest levels of power, Wortman's masterpiece follows the model that guided George Mosse's own work on the cultural dimensions of political ideology and institutions in the German case.

Premio del Rey Prize

Bernard F. Reilly (Villanova Univ.) for The Kingdom of León-Castilla under King Alfonso VII, 1126–1157 (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). Bernard Reilly provides a magisterial demonstration of what a thorough analysis of the available documentation can reveal for an important period in medieval Iberian history. Particularly impressive is his work with royal charters, in which he establishes their chronology and shows the range of information that they can reveal. Reilly's description of Alfonso VII's court and his portrait-sketches of local notables constitute an outstanding exercise in prosopography. The book will stand as a classic.

James Harvey Robinson Prize

James A. Percoco (West Springfield, Va. High School) for A Passion for the Past: Creative Teaching of U.S. History (Heinemann, 1998). This splendid book shows how educators can use a variety of resources, primary documents, archives, museums, web sites, historic locations, movies, and guest speakers to enhance student learning and to challenge their understanding of the past. The author is a dedicated and enthusiastic advocate of applied history whose highly readable work provides excellent models and references for new and experienced teachers alike. His passion for teaching and for the past is contagious and his discussions are thoughtful and analytical. The Robinson Prize Committee felt that the book provides not only useful and timely suggestions, but an imaginative and thoughtful approach to teaching history in a way that makes it come alive for students.

Wesley-Logan Prize

David Eltis (Queen's Univ.) for The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). David Eltis roots the rise of African slavery in the Americas in the integrated markets and regions that anchored the slave trade. Using economic and cultural explanations, the author demonstrates the major role of Africans in shaping the trade. He delineates the changing patterns of group identity and demography to account for the racial basis of slavery in the early modern Atlantic world. The author also shows us in new ways how European interaction with Africans reshaped conceptions of freedom and slavery.

Albert Corey Prize

The Corey Prize was announced at the Canadian Historical Association's 79th annual meeting at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, May 2000. It was awarded to Karen Dubinsky (Queen's Univ.) for The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooners, Heterosexuality, and the Tourist Industry at Niagara Falls (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1999). By focusing on a microregion whose spectacular resources are shared by both Canada and the United States, this book reconstructs the transformation of Niagara Falls from an exclusive "tourist site" into one of the most powerful symbols of 20th-century North American culture. In doing so, the author sheds important light not only on the history of North American tourism but also on the history of sexuality, of marriage, and of their growing commercialization in popular culture. Based upon a wide range of documentary sources, this book is at the cutting edge of cultural history and its analysis is fresh and compelling. Seldom has a historical work spoken so directly and pertinently to both Canadian and United States history.