At the annual meeting in San Francisco, the following prizes were announced for 1983. For the benefit of those members who did not attend the meeting, the committee citations read at the presentation ceremony are recorded below.
The Herbert Baxter Adams Prize was offered in 1983 for works in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history and was awarded to Roberta Thompson Manning of Boston College for The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (Princeton University Press).
This book unites breadth of conception with lucid and scholarly exposition. Using a wide range or source materials, Professor Manning sets forth the role of the gentry in Russian government between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. She has produced an important book that illuminates subsequent developments in Russian history. The committee takes pleasure in awarding the Adams Prize to this unusually mature first work.
The George Louis Beer Prize in European international history since 1895 was awarded to Sarah M. Terry of Tufts University for Poland’s Place in Europe: General Sikorski and the Origin of the Oder-Neisse Line, 1939-1943 (Princeton University Press).
This is a book or distinctive quality that deals with an aspect of European international history since 1895. At first glance its subject, with its focus on one important person, may appear narrow and hence not truly significant for the history of the European community as a whole. However, through careful use of available archival material, printed documents, extensive secondary sources in several languages, and impressive analysis, the author skillfully expanded her topic so that it touched on larger, long-range issues of European diplomacy. Moreover, her monograph offers more information and interpretive commentary on the origins or the border between Poland and East Germany than previously available in print. She demonstrates persuasively that the idea or extending Poland’s boundary westward came originally from General Wladyslaw Sikorski and not from the Communist policy-making structure.
This gracefully written book offers to scholars and others a perceptive appraisal of Central European politics in the complex setting of the Second World War through the vehicle of a topic that remains of interest to this day. Even though this subject has received much attention because of this interest, Professor Terry has treated it exhaustively, judiciously, and with compelling freshness. This is, in the committee’s view, an accomplishment worthy of recognition with the award of the Beer Prize.
The Albert J. Beveridge Award the best book in English on the history of the United States, Canada, or Latin America went to Louis R. Harlan, University of Maryland, College Park, for Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (Oxford University Press).
This is the second and concluding volume of Louis R. Harlan’s authoritative biography, the finest study to date of a black American. It is safe to say that no other scholar will ever master this subject as Harlan has done. He is the editor of the Booker T. Washington Papers in thirteen volumes, and has worked his way through the million documents in Washington’s vast manuscript file to trace this remarkable man’s myriad activities and his complex career. Harlan is unflinching in his presentation of an enormously energetic and purposeful yet deeply flawed black leader who became imprisoned by his accommodationist policy, and who was very much more effective at outmaneuvering his black rivals than at reversing or blunting white racism. Harlan conveys the tragic dimensions of Washington’s quest for personal power and for collective black pride in an era of rigid and rising racial segregation. This is an absorbing and deeply dispiriting book.
The John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History is offered biennially in the odd-numbered years and in 1983 was awarded to Bruce Cumings of the University of Washington for The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947 (Princeton University Press).
In the committee’s opinion this book is the first extensive analysis of Korean politics after the Second World War. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the origins of the Korean War by tying it more directly than earlier works to postwar Korea’s social revolution. The book presents a splendid synthesis of domestic and foreign affairs.
The Leo Gershoy Award, also offered biennially in the odd-numbered years, is awarded to the author of the most outstanding work in English on any aspect of the field of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European history. The award in 1983 went to Marianne Elliott, University College of Swansea, for Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (Yale University Press).
A magisterial work that is beautifully and evenhandedly written. The scope of Professor Elliott’s research is staggering. There is a sustaining narrative that throws new light not only on Irish history, but also on English and French developments, and on the republican movement in late eighteenth-century Europe.
The Howard R. Marraro Prize, offered annually for the best work on any epoch of Italian history, Italian cultural history, or Italian-American relations was awarded to John Najemy, Cornell University, for Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400 (University of North Carolina Press).
It is rare to find masterly technique, originality, and significant historical revision in one book. Drawing extensively from a rich cache of archival sources, Najemy in effect rewrites the internal political history of fourteenth-century Florence. In this brilliant reconstruction, the egalitarian and corporate politics of the guilds give way to oligarchy; the genius of the city’s republican oligarchy is revealed in the story of its capture, by means of elaborate electoral controls, of the quiet consent of an expanding class of officeholders. Najemy’s focus on the conflict between guild community and ruling oligarchy shifts attention from the leadership of republican Florence to the underlying influence of class interests. This portrait of the interaction between political institutions and the values underlying Florentine conceptions of the public world sensitively illuminates the social and cultural history of a particular place and time in Italian history.
