At the annual meeting in Chicago, the following prizes were announced for the year 1986. The committees’ citations for the awards are recorded below:
HERBERT BAXTER ADAMS PRIZE
William H. Beik, Northern Illinois University, for Absolutism and society in seventeenth-century France. State power and provincial aristocracy in Languedoc (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). This book is a thorough and thoughtful reassessment of French absolutism, which is represented persuasively as grounded in circumstances and mechanisms of class. Fine discussions of clientage and taxation contribute to explaining how Louis XIV succeeded in the provinces by getting local elites to cooperate with each other and with the state.
ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE AWARD
Alan S. Knight, University of Texas at Austin, for The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). This comprehensive history of the Mexican Revolution is anti-revisionist in insisting on the local, agrarian, and popular nature of the revolution. While a national (indeed, international in terms of its impact) revolution, Knight provides a forceful and cogent argument against those who would see in this a manipulation of the populace. He has traced the trajectory from the Porfirian old regime through to Carranza’s final success, affording new interpretations and fresh insights. He moves easily between the regional, national, and international planes. He combines a narrative form with meticulous analysis into the elegantly and lucidly written work of scholarship that has solid foundations in exhaustive research in primary and secondary sources.
PAUL BIRDSALL PRIZE
Robert A. Doughty, United States Military Academy, for The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine 1919-1939 (Hamden: Archon Books, The Shoe String Press, 1985). Based upon a com prehensive use of French military records of the interwar years, Doughty’s book carefully demonstrates how flaws in the French Army’s operational doc trine contributed to its swift defeat in 1940. By its effective analysis of how institutional, technological, and political factors can affect policy, The Seeds of Disaster offers a model study of military history.
JAMES H. BREASTED PRIZE
Benjamin I. Schwartz, Harvard University, for The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985). This is a philosophically sophisticated, humane, and thoughtful treatment of one of the world’s great intellectual traditions, the result of a lifetime’s study by a scholar of exceptional learning and insight. The enormous volume of primary and secondary texts concerning ancient Chinese philosophy and the intractability of those texts would have daunted any but the most able and patient scholar. The author has the ability to single out the unique qualities of ancient Chinese thought, and to measure the relation between thought and practice in Chinese society.
ALBERT B. COREY PRIZE (offered jointly by the AHA and Canadian Historical Association)
James L. Axtell, College of William and Mary, for The Invasion Within, the Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Ox ford University Press, 1985). Professor Axtell’s extensive research of the efforts of Indians, French, and English to convert each other offers much that is new about the impact of those cultures upon one another. This pleasingly written book will substantially increase our knowledge of cultural interaction on the North American continent during the colonial years.
JOHN H. DUNNING PRIZE
Barbara J. Fields, University of Michigan, for Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). In a wonderfully fresh approach to Southern history, Barbara Fields seeks to define the nature of slave society and the social premises that underlay struggles over the significance of freedom, especially after slavery provided a negative example. She deals with a border state, but much of what she has to say applies to several states outside the Deep South (for example, North Carolina and Virginia) where the plantation elite did not clearly dominate state politics.
Using data of the Freedom History Project as well as archival and governmental sources, Barbara Fields has approached the transition of a state noted for moderation from several angles. Her hypothesis is cogently argued and the style of writing is lively and compelling. This is the social history of one state, but the analysis skillfully probes the relationship between race and class (never confusing the two) and provides an exemplary model for new writing in Southern history.
JOHN K. FAIRBANK PRIZE
Carol Gluck, Columbia University, for Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Professor Gluck’s study is a learned and witty exploration of the construction of an ideology. Its special richness lies in its presentation of the ways that various interest groups in Japan emphasized different facets of the new ideology in their special audiences, and how those audiences then made what they wanted out of the myths the were offered.
HERBERT FEIS AWARD
Thomas M. Doerflinger, Paine Webber Incorporated, for A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Combining methods, sources, and perspectives of history, economics, politics, and business, Thomas Doerflinger’s work evokes the indigenous entrepreneurial spirit deeply ingrained in Colonial Revolutionary Philadelphia. He describes people deftly, their problems insightfully, their daring admiringly, their achievements adroitly. This graceful, pioneering book reinterprets the economic beginnings of America, and hence shows paths to our business present.
LEO GERSHOY AWARD
John M. Beattie, University of Toronto, for Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Professor Beattie has written what may honestly be termed the definitive work on the practical administration of justice in eighteenth-century England. A careful examination of court records has revealed the concerns behind changes motivated by a fear of rising crime rates and public violence.
CLARENCE H. HARING PRIZE
Jose P. Barran and Benjamin Nahum, Uruguay, for Battle, las estancieros y el imperio britanico, vols. 1-6 (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, I1979-1985). These volumes, the mature and considered work of two Uruguayan authors of originality and power, delineate those political and social interests that steadily entwined or conflicted with the forces of the world economy. Based on an enormous body of research, thoughtfully ordered and presented in straightforward prose, this work is not only a broad political, social, and economic history, but a subtle explanation of conflicting ideologies. In arguing that politics results from the complex interplay of diverse interests, its authors blend economic and sociological analysis with close attention to personalities and political groups, making their labor a model of the historian’s craft.
JOAN KELLY MEMORIAL PRIZE
Gerda Lerner, University of Wisconsin Madison, for The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). This work breaks new ground in interpreting the origin and development of patriarchal gender relationships in Western civilization. Bold and provocative, it builds theory, suggests hypotheses, sets an agenda for testing those hypotheses, and provides inspiration for those who, like Joan Kelly, are conscious of the need to redefine the problematic relationship of women to historical process and to history making. This brilliant achievement honors the legacy and memory of Joan Kelly.
WALDO G. LELAND PRIZE
Kenneth C. Martis, West Virginia University, for The Historical Atlas of United States Congressional Districts, 1789-1983 (New York: The Free Press, 1985). In seeking the “most outstanding reference tool in the field of history” that has been published in the five years ending June 1, 1986, the prize committee looked for a broadly conceived work dealing intelligently, innovatively, and thoroughly with an important subject of interest to a substantial cross section of users. The atlas is such a work. Splendidly researched, it combines sound and original scholarship with practical usefulness, providing a wealth of information. In neatly solving a basic problem of historical research about the House of Representatives, this work also makes available and useful the massive work of previous generations of scholars.
LITTLETON-GRISWOLD PRIZE
Michael Grossberg, Case Western Reserve University, for Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). In Governing the Hearth, Professor Grossberg presents the results of an ambitious and highly revealing inquiry into the development of the American law of “domestic relations” in the nineteenth century. He provides an insightful reconstruction of doctrinal change and innovation, but in addition he uses the courts as a window through which to view the interrelation ships of law and social change. The work is, withal, a learned and imaginative contribution of major significance to the field of American legal history.
HOWARD R. MARRARO PRIZE
Joan Barth Urban, Catholic University of America, for Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti to Berlinguer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). A penetrating analysis of the relationship between the Italian Communist Party and Soviet leadership which argues persuasively that the experience of Togliatti and his successors made them tolerant of internal dissent, open to reformist alliances, and resist ant to Moscow centralism. Urban’s detailed and subtle account of the Italian Communists under Fascism and in exile illuminates their postwar search for a via italiana to socialism, including the compromesso storico and Eurocommunism. Deeply researched in archival and other sources, Italian and Russian, the volume skillfully orchestrates the themes of ideology, party politics, international development and personality.
ROBERT LIVINGSTON SCHUYLER PRIZE
Stephen Koss, Columbia University, for The Rise and Fall of the Political Press, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981-84). It is a matter for profound regret that Professor Koss has died since the publication of this outstanding work. Distinguished by its originality and scope, it demonstrates the talent of a brilliant historian who has given in it a penetrating and lively account of the role of journalism in British party politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By reason of the importance of its subject, its mastery of sources, and its sure knowledge of the intricacies of politics, it will take its place as essential reading for students of modern British political history.
The annual GEORGE LOUIS BEER PRIZE for outstanding historical writ ing in European international history since 1895 was not awarded. The prize committee chair reported that, “After due deliberation and with considerable regret, the committee has decided not to give an award this year. Some members of the committee believed, from the start of our discussions, that no award should be given. The rest of the committee was deeply divided over any sin gle nominee. The only consensus to emerge, therefore, was a negative one. I am sorry to have to convey this disappointing news, but I have no doubt that it is the committee’s collective wish.”
