Beveridge Family Prize in American History
To promote and honor outstanding historical writing, the American Historical Association offers each year the Beveridge Family Prize in American History. The award was established on a biennial basis in 1939 and has been awarded annually since 1945. It originally honored US Senator Albert J. Beveridge (Indiana, 1899–1911), a longtime member of the Association and an active supporter of history as both a lawyer and a senator.
The Beveridge Fund was created by a gift of $50,000 from Mrs. Catherine Beveridge in honor of her husband in 1927. Mrs. Beveridge wrote to the AHA of her desire for “a separate fund bearing my husband’s name and devoted to research in American history.” The fund was augmented by donations from friends of Senator Beveridge and the scope of the award was enlarged to encompass Latin America and Canada as well as the United States.
The award is given for a distinguished book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada, from 1492 to the present. Books that employ new methodological or conceptual tools or that constitute significant reexaminations of important interpretive problems will be given preference. Literary merit is also an important criterion. The current prize amount is $1,000. See the list of past recipients.
General rules for submission are:
- Biographies, monographs, and works of synthesis and interpretation are eligible; translations, anthologies, and collections of documents are not.
- Only books bearing a copyright of 2023 are eligible for the 2024 prize.
- Nomination submissions may be made by an author or by a publisher. Authors or publishers may submit the same book for multiple AHA prizes.
- Nominators must complete an online prize submission form for each book submitted.
- No more than five titles from any one publisher may be submitted.
- One copy of each entry must be sent to each committee member and clearly labeled “Beveridge Family Prize Entry.” Print copies preferred unless otherwise indicated. If only e-copy is available, please contact review committee members beforehand to arrange submission format.
Please Note: Entries must be received by May 15, 2024, to be eligible for the 2024 competition. Entries will not be returned. Recipients will be announced on the AHA website in October 2024 and recognized during a ceremony at the January 2025 AHA annual meeting in New York.
For questions, please contact the Prize Administrator.
2023 Beveridge Award
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, University of California, Santa Cruz
Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Study of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press)
This erudite, confident, and methodologically sophisticated book approaches the entangled histories of British, Spanish, and Indigenous Americas through Cotton Mather’s overlooked book, Le Fe del Christiano, written to evangelize Spanish American readers. Drawing on extensive archival foundations and imaginative critical analyses, Kirsten Silva Gruesz weaves together histories of languages, the book, empires, subaltern (often enslaved) peoples, and Puritan New England to provide a stunning portrait of a “vast early America” that moves beyond colonial binaries to include Indigenous and Hispanic histories.