Publication Date

May 1, 2012

Perspectives Section

AHA Activities, News

Editor's Note: The purpose of this column, which is published in Perspectives on Historyas space permits, is to recognize and honor the accomplishments of AHA members. Submissions are welcome; entries will be published in alphabetical order. To submit an entry, e-mail or write to , Web Editor, AHA, 400 A Street SE, Washington, DC 20003-3889.

  • Kevin Butterfield, assistant professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma, has been named a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for 2012–13 by the New-York Historical Society.

  • Katrina Gulliver has published Modern Women in China and Japan: Gender, Feminism and Global Modernity Between the Wars (I. B. Tauris, 2012). Through a focus on the writings of the Western women who engaged with East Asia, and the Asian writers who reacted to this new global gender communication by forming their own separate identities, this book examines the complex redefining of the self taking place in a crucial time of political and economic upheaval.

  • Thomas A. Horrocks has been appointed director of the John Hay Library at Brown University, effective July 9, 2012. He is currently associate librarian of the Houghton Library for Collections at Harvard University.

  • Elizabeth D. Leonard, John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Professor of History at Colby College, is a co-winner of the 2012 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for her book,Lincoln's Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky (UNC Press). William C. Harris is a co-winner of the prize, forLincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union (Kansas).

  • Andrew C. Lipman, assistant professor of history at Syracuse University, will develop his dissertation, “The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Colonization of Long Island Sound,” while in residence at the New-York Historical Society through an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship.

  • Danielle McGuire, assistant professor in history at Wayne State University, has won numerous awards and fellowships in the past year, mainly for her recent book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance (Knopf). Her achievements include the Board of Governor’s Faculty Recognition Award, Wayne State University (2012); Japanese Residency Award, Yamaguchi University, Organization of American Historians (2012); Outstanding Academic Title, Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries (2012); Outstanding Achievement by a Wisconsin Author, Wisconsin Library Association (2011); Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians (2011); Junior Faculty Award, Wayne State University Academy of Scholars (2011); Lillian Smith Book Award, the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries (2011); Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians (2011); and the Darlene Clark Hine Award, Honorable Mention, Organization of American Historians (2011).

  • Catherine McNeur, a PhD candidate at Yale University, has won a Bernard & Irene Schwartz Fellowship from the New-York Historical Society.

  • Jörg Muth‘s book Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901–1940, and the Consequences for World War II (University of North Texas Press, 2011) was just selected by General Raymond T. Odierno, Chief of Staff of the US Army, for his new professional reading list. Command Culture is also a finalist for the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award. The book examines the different paths the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces traveled to select, educate, and promote their officers in the crucial time before World War II. Command Culture connects successfully the pre-World War II officer education of the U.S. Army and its traditions and culture with the conduct of the War against Terror today. Because of that, Gerhard Weinberg attested the work “immediate present-day relevance.”

  • Dael A. Norwood, a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University, has also won a Bernard & Irene Schwartz Fellowship from the New-York Historical Society.

  • Cynthia E. Orozco, chair of Eastern New Mexico University Ruidoso History and Humanities Dept., was elected a fellow of the Texas State Historical Association in March.

  • José G. Rigau-Pérez (San Juan, Puerto Rico) has just published “El Compendio de la historia de Puerto-Rico en verso de Pío del Castillo y los primeros manuales escolares puertorriqueños sobre historia, 1848–1863.” The text consists of the facsimile of the previously unknown Compendio (a 32-page manual that has survived as a single copy at the library of the Hispanic Society of America, in New York) and a historical study of the pedagogical, administrative and political context of the first school manuals written and published in Puerto Rico, with emphasis on those devoted to local history. The Compendio seems to be the first school manual written and published in Puerto Rico; it does not appear in any of the comprehensive bibliographies, and there is no other known copy. The historical analysis presents the manner of teaching in primary school, the other textbooks written and published in Puerto Rico in the mid-nineteenth century, and the government’s control of the contents of Puerto Rican history textbooks up to 1898.

  • Sophia Rosenfeld, professor of history at the University of Virginia, has won the Mark Lynton History Prize forCommon Sense: A Political History (Harvard University Press).

  • Daniel J. Sharfstein, professor of history at Vanderbilt University, has won the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press).

  • Elizabeth Schmidt, professor of African history at Loyola University Maryland, received the “Faculty Award for Outstanding Service-Learning” at a March 2012 Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Conference sponsored by 29 colleges and universities in Maryland and the District of Columbia. The award recognized her students’ work with Baltimore City Community College’s Refugee Youth Project and Soccer Without Borders-Baltimore.

  • Lawrence S. Wittner, emeritus professor of history at SUNY/Albany, has published his autobiography, Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual (University of Tennessee Press). The book describes his career as an historian and peace researcher, as well as his activity in the peace, racial equality, and labor movements.

  • John R. Wennersten, environmental historian and professor of history emeritus at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, has just published Global Thirst: Water and Society in the 21st Century (Schiffer Books, 2012). The book is a critical analysis of water, its uses, and access to it, and examines pollution, drought, dying rivers, and the privatization of water utilities across the globe, ranging from Nigeria and India to China and Australia as well as the United States.

is the AHA web editor.

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