The AHA’s General Meeting took place on Friday, January 8, 2010 at this year’s annual meeting. During this time the presentation of awards to recipients of AHA prizes took place, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gave her presidential address. Read on for an overview of the address and a list of all the award winners.
A Stitch in Time: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Turns a Quilt into a Rich Tapestry of History
She found it useful sometimes to address large questions by focusing on a single object, said President Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, delivering her presidential address entitled "An American Album." The object in question was a simple quilt, made in the Utah territory in 1857. But she unfolded it to lucidly tell a complex historical tale of patriarchal politics, ideologies, and religious beliefs. Originally made in the same epochal year as the Dred Scott decision and the mutiny in India, the quilt was sundered into two when it was passed on 60 odd years later as a legacy to the next generation. Only after another hundred years had passed by was it made whole again by a descendant who not only joined the two halves, but also gathered details about the women who had contributed to the making of the quilt. Work of such amateur historians and genealogists was valuable and should be acknowledged, said Ulrich, who then went on to stitch those details into her own reading of the quilt. Taking a close look at some of the quilt’s many and variegated squares, Ulrich delighted the audience with insightful and perceptive revisionings of what the quiltmakers inscribed into the fabric, situating the new, seemingly simple, but elaborate narratives into histories of interpersonal relations, of the Mormon Church, and of public reactions to polygamy and the politics of gender. The address, which will appear in the February 2010 issue of the American Historical Review, was another captivating example of Laurel Thatcher’s remarkable ability of taking a simple object and transforming it into an artifact of compelling historical interest and narrative power.
2009 Book Awards and Prizes
The following prizes were announced at the General Meeting. For this list, expanded to include citations and some biographies see the 2009 Book Awards and Prizes page on the AHA web site.
Book Prizes
- Herbert Baxter Adams Prize
Priya Satia, Stanford University
Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford University Press) - George Louis Beer Prize
William I. Hitchcock, Temple University
The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Free Press) - Albert J. Beveridge Award
Karl Jacoby, Brown University
Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (Penguin Press) - James Henry Breasted Prize
Zainab Bahrani, Columbia University
Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia (Zone Books, distributed by MIT Press) - John H. Dunning Prize
Peggy Pascoe, University of Oregon
What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford University Press) - John Edwin Fagg Prize
Stuart B. Schwartz, Yale University
All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (Yale University Press) - John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History
Klaus Mühlhahn, Indiana University
Criminal Justice in China: A History (Harvard University Press) - Morris D. Forkosch Prize
Christopher Otter, Ohio State University
The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (University of Chicago Press) - Leo Gershoy Award
Stuart B. Schwartz, Yale University
All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (Yale University Press) - J. Franklin Jameson Prize
Jean Fagan Yellin, Pace University
The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (University of North Carolina Press) - Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History
Peggy Pascoe, University of Oregon
What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford University Press) - Littleton-Griswold Prize
Laura F. Edwards, Duke University
The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (University of North Carolina Press) - J. Russell Major Prize
Rachel G. Fuchs, Arizona State University
Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press) - Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize
Thomas J. Kuehn, Clemson University
Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge University Press) - George L. Mosse Prize
Stuart B. Schwartz, Yale University
All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (Yale University Press) - James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History
Maria-Elena Martinez, University of Southern California
Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press) - Wesley-Logan Prize
Alexander X. Byrd, Rice University
Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Louisiana State University Press)
Awards for Scholarly Distinction
- Saul Friedländer, University of California, Los Angeles
- Leon Litwack
- Brad D. Lookingbill, Columbia College of Missouri
Beveridge Family Teaching Prize
- Oral History Project, D.C. Everest High School, Weston, Wisconsin.
- Elise Lipkowitz, University of Michigan
Herbert Feis Award for Distinguished Contributions to Public History
- Noel J. Stowe, Arizona State University
William Gilbert Award for the Best Article on Teaching History
- Julia Clancy-Smith, University of Arizona
“An Undergraduate and Graduate Colloquium in Social History and Biography in the Modern Middle East and North Africa” in Teaching Life Writing Texts, Modern Language Association.
- Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness. Producers: Llewellyn Smith, Vincent Brown, and Christine Herbes-Sommers. Co-production of Vital Pictures and the Independent Television Service.
Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award
- Lynn Hunt, UCLA
Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History
- Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915–1930, http://www.acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/harlem/, Stephen Robertson, Shane White, Stephen Garton, and Graham White, University of Sydney
- Romila Thapar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
This post first appeared on AHA Today.
Tags: AHA Today Annual Meeting through 2010
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