Editor's Note: The purpose of this column, which is published in Perspectives as 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, write to David Darlington, Associate Editor, AHA, 400 A Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003-3889.

• Barbara Miller Lane, emeritus professor in the humanities and McBride Professor of History of Art and Cities at Bryn Mawr College, and an AHA member, has been awarded a Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship to work on the topic "American tract houses of the 1950s and 1960s: a critical reinterpretation." Lane, a graduate of the University of Chicago and Barnard College, received her PhD in history from Harvard University, and has been teaching at Bryn Mawr College since 1962. She is the author of a classic work on German architecture and planning in the early 20th century. Her other publications have ranged from discussions of the role of public buildings in shaping the cityscape, to explorations of the influence of nationalism on European architecture.

  The Growth and Structure of Cities Program founded by Lane at Bryn Mawr in 1971 continues to bring together art and architecture, history, political science, anthropology, economics, sociology and geology to examine cities from an interdisciplinary, multicultural perspective. At the time of her retirement, Lane's students established a lecture series in her honor, as "a forum for innovative research on the relationship among history, culture, architecture and urban form."

• Rafis Abazov (Harriman Institute) published a new book, Historical Dictionary of Turkmenistan (Scarecrow Press, 2005). He has begun working on his next book project, Customs and Culture of the Central Asian Republics (Greenwood Press).

• Harriet Alonso (City College, CUNY) has received an NEH Fellowship for her work on Robert E. Sherwood, the playwright, screenwriter, and propaganda and speech adviser to Franklin Roosevelt.

• Giancarlo Casale (Harvard Univ.) was named an NEH-ARIT fellow by the American Research Institute in Turkey for 2004–05. Casale is studying the Ottoman expansion in the Indian Ocean from 1517 to 1589 in order to create a coherent narrative of the events of the period, and to place them in the larger context of the 16th-century Age of Exploration.

• Sarah Hanley (Univ. of Iowa), a Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library for 2004–05, has been awarded the Edwin Surrency prize by the American Society for Legal History for her article, "The Jurisprudence of the Arrets: Family Union, Civil Society, and State Formation in France, 1550–1650," in Law and History Review.

• From a field of almost 40 books, the Taft Labor History Prize Committee has awarded two Taft Labor History Prizes for 2004. The Taft Prizes for this year go to AHA members Frank Tobias Higbie (Newberry Library) for Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers & Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930 (Univ. of Illinois Press) and to Robert Rodgers Korstad (Duke Univ.) for Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Univ. of North Carolina Press). Frank Tobias Higbie's book, Indispensable Outcasts, is an imaginative recreation of the diverse people, mostly younger men, who formed an ever-shifting transient labor force between the late 19th century and the Great Depression. Higbie's clear and lucid book is a deft interplay of social history, labor studies, cultural studies, and ethnography. In Civil Rights Unionism, Robert Rodgers Korstad recounts the story of tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, during the 1940s and 50s in a work that is beautifully written and conceived, deeply researched, and ambitious in scope. In telling the story of black and white workers, both male and female, coming together in support of industrial unionism, Korstad weaves together union organizing and Cold War politics in a compelling way. The Taft Labor History Prize is an annual competition sponsored by the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, and carries with it a $1,000 award for the author.

• Melvin Holli (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago) is the co-author of The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition published in January 2005 and will be delivering a paper on American city government at the Nordic Association of American Studies Conference in Vaxjo Sweden, May 26–28, 2005.

• Jeffrey Kimball (Miami Univ.) received the Arthur S. Link—Warren F. Kuehl book prize at the 2005 Seattle AHA annual meeting for The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon Era Strategy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations awards the prize to documentary works distinguished by the inclusion of both appropriate historical context and interpretive historical commentaries based on scholarly research.

• Martin Melosi, Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Houston, has been named recipient of the Esther Farfel Award for 2005. The award is the highest accolade bestowed on a faculty member by the university, in recognition of overall career excellence in research, teaching, and service.

• Emil J. Polak (Queensborough Community College, CUNY) recently published A Medievalist's Odyssey: Helene Wieruszowski, Scholar, Uomini e dottrine 41 (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2004). Professor Wieruszowski (1893–1978) was the first full-time female member of the Department of History of the City College of New York. The book is an anthology of essays based upon presentations made at the 108th annual meeting of the AHA.

• James E. Reed has been appointed Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Public Policy by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board of the U.S. Department of State. He is based in the Toronto, Canada, area, where he is Visiting Professor of History at the University of Waterloo, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of International Governance Innovation.

• Dorothy Moses Schulz (John Jay College of Criminal Justice) is the author of a new book, Breaking the Brass Ceiling: Women Police Chiefs and Their Paths to the Top (Praeger, 2004). In addition to providing interviews and demographic information about current women police chiefs and sheriffs, Schulz traces the histories of the women who served in these positions prior to the 1920s.

• The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicines (NCCAM) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $1.2 million grant to Alain Touwaide (Smithsonian Institution) to pursue a research entitled "Medicinal Plants of Antiquity: A Computerized Database." The research will be conducted over the years 2004–08 in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington D.C. It aims at: (a) computerizing the texts of classical antiquity on the therapeutic uses of plants (Greek and Latin original text), (b) translating them into English, (c) databasing the material (original texts and English translation), (d) providing data from the primary sources with the relevant explanations for a good understanding, and (e) making all such material available through a web site.

• Hans P. Vought (SUNY, Ulster County Community College) has published a book, The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897–1933 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer Univ. Press, 2004). He also delivered a paper, "Standing at Armageddon and Battling for the Melting Pot: The Issue of Immigration Restriction in the 1912 Election," at the third Woodrow Wilson National Symposium at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Birthplace in Staunton, Virginia, on Sept. 25, 2004.