For a first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
2020 > Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
This meticulously researched and superbly rendered study analyzes the subversive practices of African women and women of African descent in Atlantic slave societies of the eighteenth century. The scale and scope of the book are staggering as the narrative moves from Senegambia to colonial Louisiana documenting the agency, actions, and varying experiences of Black women. The author deftly brings together scattered threads of interdisciplinary theories of race, diaspora studies, and feminist methodologies, and draws on primary sources, especially Black women’s life histories, collected from an impressive range of archives. The stories center on everyday realms of pleasure, intimacy, and kinship relations and how Black women negotiated these to challenge their enslavement. Thus, the book problematizes the meanings of emancipation and freedom. Using feminist methodologies, it moves beyond the formal legal, social, and political spheres to reconstruct a more comprehensive history of racial slavery based on Black women’s perspectives and actions. The author’s ability to highlight the interconnections between the macro and micro, the transatlantic and the comptoir, power and dependence, subversions and negotiations, have rendered this book exceptional.
Johnson’s writing transports the reader, taking them to fascinating stories and places. It is a critical intervention, a global women’s history at its most comprehensive, and a welcome addition to the field.
2020 Runner up> Erika Denise Edwards, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, The Law, and the Making of White Argentine Republic (University of Alabama Press, 2020)
Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (2020) is an excellent study of the lived experience of African-descended women in the city of Córdoba that spans the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The historiography of the Black experience and on slavery and freedom in Argentina (Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata) has focused on the capital Buenos Aires. Hiding in Plain Sight reorients our attention to a place in the interior with a strong African presence, where women made important personal and economic choices to lead dignified lives in a context where whiteness correlated with privilege and power. Based on rich archival research and a command of race, diasporic, and gender theory, Edwards’s book shows that African-descended women protected themselves and their families by adeptly navigating legal and social obstacles put into place by statesmen to uphold white supremacy. It is history-from-below at its best.
2019 > Lauren Jae Gutterman, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage (Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
Finalist for this award: Katie L. Jarvis, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
2018 > Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
Beautifully written and analytically and historically innovative, Blain’s book demonstrates how a supposedly “failed movement,” the activism of black nationalist women who challenged white supremacy and advocated for full citizenship and human rights for people of African descent, could nonetheless offer important sources of identity, voice, and power to the women who constituted it. With deftness and superior historical skill, Blain embraces difficult topics – such as the alliances forged between white supremacists and black nationalists around emigration campaigns – to demonstrate how these moments of dissociation and dissonance offered space for the creation of novel forms of feminist thought within black nationalist and internationalist traditions.
From prison cells and community centers, and from the steps of the U.S. Capitol and the center of Trafalgar Square, Blain’s female historical actors fought for a black nationalism that was constituted on their own terms. Featuring an impressive archive and transnational in scope, every single chapter in this book offers serious interventions, contributions, and reinterpretations of familiar historical narratives. Set the World on Fire helps us to better understand and grapple with the contradictions and struggles that often arise in our most important and most meaningful political movements.
2017 > Sasha Turner. Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
Bringing together histories of women, gender, and sexuality with those of abolitionism, Turner’s book offers a history of the experiences of enslaved women in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Jamaica, showing how these women were cast as reproductive laborers by the abolitionists who claimed to seek their freedom. Recognizing that slave owners and abolitionists held different values and views about the value of enslaved women’s bodies, Turner employs insightful analyses to examine how British abolitionist men reified patriarchal relations in promoting reproduction as the primary purpose of an enslaved woman’s life. Throughout the book, Turner never loses sight of the experiences of enslaved women themselves, illuminating how unfree women maintained their own childbirth and child-rearing rituals, resisting outside efforts to control their reproduction. This results in a fresh and dynamic take, showcasing best practices for historians who seek to recover and amplify voices that have been either accidentally overlooked or deliberately silenced. The book offers a masterful synthesis of cultural history, social history, and the histories of sexuality, reproduction, and childbirth, producing a very complex book with serious implications for the field. Turner’s Contested Bodies has the potential to reach meaningfully to audiences both inside and outside of academia.
2016 > Marisa J. Fuentes. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Marissa Fuentes has written an original, complex, and perceptive book about enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados. Each chapter combines a finely grained study of an individual woman with a discerning analysis of the slender and problematic archival evidence of her life. From sheer fragments, Fuentes places women in the context of urban Caribbean slavery and powerfully reconstructs the features of their lives. Each chapter answers implicit questions about its subject: How did she labor? What urban spaces did she move through? What discipline and violence did she encounter? Fuentes carefully demonstrates the ways in which enslaved women “enacted their personhood” despite their experiences of violence, dehumanization, and commodification.
The theoretical foundations of Dispossessed Lives are as paradigm shifting as its substantive conclusions. Fuentes took on the troubled and frustrating archive upon which we are reliant to help excavate the lives of enslaved women in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. In addition to recovering and reconstructing lives, the book also addresses the production and survival of knowledge about enslaved women. Fuentes reads “along the bias grain of the archive” and boldly confronts its erasures, silences, and politics. Lucid, absorbing, and troubling, Dispossessed Lives is a rich addition to the study of early modern enslaved women.
Finalists for this award
- Zara Anishanslin. Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.
- Emily K. Hobson. Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.
2015 > Talitha L. LeFlouria. Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Talithia L. LeFlouria’s Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South is a pathbreaking study that puts African American women’s convict labor center stage, from Reconstruction through the 1930s. With vivid, poignant descriptions, this book artfully recreates the distinctive and disturbing world of black women’s prison labor. Inmates moved well beyond women’s traditional agricultural and domestic work to toil in brickyards foundries, and sawmills, for instance, under an expanding penal system that looked frighteningly similar to the system of slavery that had supposedly been dismantled after the Civil War. Alongside its examination of labor, the book also highlights the penal codes and the status of black female prisoners, compares them to their male counterparts, uncovers the centrality of physical and sexual violence to their experience of imprisonment, and chronicles their resistance. Powerfully written, carefully researched, and richly documented, Chained in Silence resonates with contemporary debates about race and incarceration. This is a field-changing book.
Finalists for this award
- Sara Fieldston. Raising the World: Child Welfare in the American Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
- Olivia Weisser. Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
2014 > Susanah Shaw Romney. New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
2013 > Camille Robcis, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in Twentieth-Century France, Cornell University Press, 2013.
For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
2020 > Gina A. Tam, Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
This book starts with an original, brilliantly formulated question about the role that modern societies have assigned to standard languages in the construction of national identities. In the case of modern China, both the question and the answer are counter-intuitive; as Tam notes, “remarkably few people within the PRC’s borders speak [Mandarin] exclusively,” or Putonghua, the official language, with “nearly 80 percent of the PRC citizens grow[ing] up speaking one or several fangyan,” the “local Chinese languages that are often mutually intelligible with spoken Putonghua.”
Working on Chinese history, with challenging archival access and in the face of state scrutiny, is difficult. Moreover, in the wrong hands, a book such as this could be dry and pedantic. Yet, Tam breathes life into her subject, allowing the regional variations of language and the cultural meanings that attach to these differences to sparkle. Through rigorous research and careful prose, Tam wrote a radical alternative story of how modern nations and identities are formed and offers tremendous nuance and context in relation to the contemporary moves that the PRC took to promote a homogenous state and citizenship narrative.
2020 > Alice L. Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (Basic Books, 2020)
Baumgartner’s beautifully rendered and lucid narrative explores the largely overlooked histories of thousands of people who escaped slavery in the US prior to the Civil War by crossing the border into Mexico, where a gradual emancipation movement that began in 1824 led to the abolition of slavery in 1837 and the codification of the “freedom principle.” The appreciation of Mexico’s active role in annihilating slavery elucidates the joined history of the two countries and demonstrates the influence of Mexico’s “moral power” on US domestic and foreign policies. Her findings raise questions about previous works that mainly drew on US sources and perpetuated the biased view that neither the Mexican government nor Mexican people were committed to anti-slavery.
The book, based on meticulous archival research, gives a fine-grained account of the contributions of the individual people who destabilized the US slave regime by fleeing to free land. Baumgartner’s work is an exceptional example of transnational history. Innovative and elegantly written, the monograph tackles the challenge of weaving a large corpus of sources located in two countries and varied historiographies into a tight fabric. South to Freedom is an important, original, and lasting contribution to the hemispheric history of emancipation.
2019 > Sarah A. Seo, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
Finalist for this award: Amy C. Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of the Welfare and Developmental State in the Americas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
2018 > Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018).
Citation:
Encompassing centuries of ancestral Algonquian history, Memory Lands offers a revolutionary rewriting of history via the study of topophilia — women’s and men’s senses of place, and their attachment to place — to offer an ethnohistorical account of how Algonquian communities have reconstituted their experience as colonized people. Most impressively, DeLucia makes these moves in order to forefront Algonquian peoples’ understanding of memory, loss, and history. Focusing on the conflict known as King Philip’s War, the book provides astute analysis of how Algonquian people commemorated this event, and how English colonizers and their descendants simultaneously maintained their own narratives of it in ways that served to erase Indigenous history.
Drawing upon material objects, oral histories, archaeological data, proceedings of memorial associations, newspapers, photographs, diaries, property documentation, and local government records, Memory Lands offers an unconventional and revealing configuration of history that allows the author to demonstrate that there are sites where people make memories, and places where they grapple with history, and that these sites shape our understanding of change over time. A breathtaking study of remembrance and place which lies at the intersection of multiple fields, Memory Lands offers a major contribution to American Studies, US History, North American Ethnohistory, and Memory Studies. This heady, powerful book urges us to rethink the ways that we practice history, especially of topics that are simultaneously so painful and so important.
2017 > S. Debora Kang, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Kang’s timely, thought-provoking book offers a history of the ways that officials from the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service formulated and implemented policies and laws to manage the U.S.-Mexico border. The book sheds light on the long history of militarizing this border, showing how, over the course of the twentieth century, the U.S. Border Patrol became an increasingly aggressive government body. In contrast to today, U.S. immigration officials used to show remarkable flexibility in accommodating both a cross-border economy and cross-border cultural ties. Drawing upon the lived experience of border officials, residents, and immigrants in Arizona, California, and Texas, Kang’s book uses an impressive range of sources drawn from a deep archive, including both local and national perspectives, and balances published material with rich oral histories. The book makes wonderful contributions to many subfields, including borderlands and transnational histories, immigration studies, and the history of the U.S. government. Kang’s book offers invaluable insights into the ways that immigration policy has evolved on the nation’s southwestern board with Mexico, and how critically important it is for us to understand the long and tumultuous history of power, politics, and control on the border.
2016 > Anya Zilberstein. A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
[Global Warming and Global Cooling in Early Boston Lecture by Anya Zilberstein – watch here: https://youtu.be/nQVtlrUNNR0 ]
2015 > Vanessa Ogle. The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Vanessa Ogle’s, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950 is an ambitious and inventive transnational examination of how time was understood, managed, marked, and recorded across the world at the turn of the twentieth century. Using English, French, German, and Arabic sources, Ogle shows that debates about how to mark time and create a standard system of telling time became a feature of national and international conversations between philosophers, scientists, businesspeople, religious authorities, and national and anti-colonial leaders. She contests the idea that keeping time emanated from elites in the so-called west. Instead, she argues that as the world became better connected from the late nineteenth century onward (through, for instance, the telegraph and railroads), these networks pressured nations and localities to adopt standardized times. Remarkable in scope, richly documented, and beautifully written, Ogle shows how time became a global obsession in the modern era, and how it was resolved in distinct ways depending on locality and historical context.
Finalists for this award
- Sanya Aiyar. Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
- Ruramisai Charumbira. Imagining a Nation: History and Memory in Making Zimbabwe. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015.
- Dana Simmons. Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
2014 > Tatiana Seijas. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: from Chinos to Indians. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
2013 > Teresa Barnett, Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America, University of Chicago Press, 2013.
