Award for Scholarly Distinction Recipients
In 1984 the Council of the American Historical Association established an award entitled the Award for Scholarly Distinction. The awards go to senior historians of the highest distinction who have spent the bulk of their professional careers in the United States.
2017 Awards for Scholarly Distinction
Richard S. Dunn, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Richard S. Dunn, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, has been one of the most productive and innovative scholars and editors in the field of early American history throughout his long career. As an administrator, he has advanced the study of the field through his founding and leadership of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Dunn has now attained new heights with the publication of A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (2014), a magisterial comparative study of 2,000 enslaved people over many decades in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The project encompasses an interactive website containing details about 431 individuals in seven multi-generational families so that students and scholars can reap further benefits from analyses of his extraordinary effort in data gathering.
John M. Merriman, Yale Univ.
John M. Merriman is the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University, where he is an internationally recognized specialist in the history of modern France. As his many publications make clear, John Merriman is one of the leading historians of modern France and modern Europe working in the United States. His books are distinguished by an exceptional familiarity with the archives as well as beautiful writing and thoughtful argumentation. His scholarly work has had a major impact on his field and been very influential both in America and abroad.