2023
2023 > For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
In Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, Lucia Carminati explores migration, labor, and power in the developing city of Port Said during the construction of the Suez Canal. Port Said as a physical and fixed place is made more capacious by Carminati’s nuanced assessment of the complex population of migrant laborers who converged on, and created, a city site to construct (what would become) a globally significant shipping canal. Seeking Bread deftly plays on the canal’s intended function as a conduit for the mobility of goods while skillfully addressing the mobility of migratory labor. Carminati incorporates multiple aspects of the canal’s building, arguing mostly that a deeper examination of the laborers who constructed the canal reveal the complexity of mobility, of identities of migrant labor in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, of the formation of a city/community by migrants, and how laborers sought agency in a struggle over power with elites. The history of the Suez Canal and the development of a port city and its government are present in this work, but labor remains at the center. Most obvious is Carminati’s astute use of migrant stories as sources, in addition to conventional memoirs, travel guides, and newspapers. This work is a valuable and timely contribution to the field of the Middle East, the economic impetus behind urbanization, and importantly, global migration.
2023 > Honorable Mention for a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
In Merchants of Virtue, Divya Cherian has made a monumental contribution to historical knowledge of Hindu-ness and Hindu consciousness. Using 17th -18th century records from Marwar, under Rathor rule, Cherian traces how the state and an emergent merchant class used and reconfigured caste to consolidate social and political power. Marwar, a regional center, was part of global changes in oceanic trade, capital markets, and the circulation of goods during the early modern period. As an economic force, Marwar merchants tied their role as money lenders to the needs of the ruling elite and consolidated upper caste conditions and standing. The depth of research and nuance of argument are gifts that Cherian deploys to show how the fluidity of everyday custom got harnessed to rigid practices that further inscribed Hinduism in the colonial period and Hindu nationalism in anti-colonial struggle. Cherian brings clarity and authority to her work. The committee particularly commends the author for the contributions to the field andthe myriad ways the book asks us to rethink how, when, why, and from what the body politic emerges as well as from which individual bodies, in what spaces, bear the biggest burdens.
It should be noted that the book available to all through the University of California Press open source program, and available at https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.139
2023 > For a first book in the field of the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
Elizabeth O’Brien has written a brilliant book that centers Mexican women as historical actors across a long temporal sweep from 1770-1940. Based on a variety of sources, from the theses of medical students to newspaper articles, she tells the story of women who experienced surgical procedures. Rich empirical data reveals the depth of her quantitative research, which is elegantly presented with rich analysis. This history could have been the story of doctors as agents of the state given the sources, but it’s not, or it could also have been about religious actors, but reading against the grain we are presented a well fleshed out history of the deep entanglements between medicine, religion, and state in dictating women’s reproductive destinies in Mexico. Surgery and Salvation is crafted in the best traditions of transnational feminist history, where the author leans on interdisciplinary scholarship and comparative analysis to capture competing histories of reproduction, as it intersects with politics and histories of race, class, gender, religion, and nation. O’Brien’s book is a timely intervention in the contentious debates on reproductive rights, while masterfully sidestepping potential pitfalls of anachronism. We see the book adding much to our appreciation of competing global reproductive histories, encouraging readers to imagine multiple possibilities for the future.
2023 > Honorable Mentions in the field of the history of women, gender, and/or sexualities
Ricci’s work is an important contribution to the history of feminism(s) in Montreal from the 1960s to the 1990s. Writing against the “exclusion narrative,” which centers the older white English and French-speaking communities in the city, her work provides a true comparative framework to better understand the complex history of feminist activism among often understudied minority groups in Quebec. Examining the ways in which distinct political projects shaped each community’s approach to feminism, Contercurrents offers a well-developed study of the differing priorities, hopes, and struggles of the area’s French-Canadian, Italian, Kanien’kehá:ka, African, and Haitian women.Using newsletters, conference proceedings, newspapers, oral histories, personal archives, and community-based archives, the book grapples with an extremely complex socio-cultural and political history. It draws from an extensive historiography, developing arguments that engage with scholars writing on French and English Canadian, American, Indigenous, immigration, transnational, colonial, and global South history. Altogether, Ricci’s work has depth and nuance, and compels us to rethink well-known concepts, such as feminism, radicalism, and nationalism, and what they truly meant to the women who practiced them.
2022
2022 > For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
Christina Ramos, Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment (The University North Carolina Press, 2022)Bedlam in the New World is a history of madness – of how people understood mental illness and grappled with the complexities of caring for individuals who did not conform to prescribed behavior. Focused on the Hospital of Saint Hippolytus in Mexico City (established in 1567), Christina Ramos shows that the first mental hospital in the Americas remained a remarkably flexible institution for over three hundred years.
She does so by taking a history from below approach that centers the experiences of people who stayed there. Based on exemplary archival research, the author sophisticatedly pieces together a narrative that challenges historiographical assumptions that such places were about social control and punishment, as posited for Europe. Instead, Ramos reveals that people who struggled with mental distress found a degree of respite within this hospital’s walls. Nurses and doctors operated within a caregiving culture based on Christian ethics that did not weaponize scientific knowledge.
Ramos thus demonstrates that the medicalization of mental illness varied by historical context, in this case driven by a sense of social responsibility for suffering people. Her book is a novel contribution to various fields, including the history of science and medicine and urban history.
Read more: Washington U. Center for the Humanities interview with Christina Ramos >
Honorable Mention: 2022 > Kathryn Olivarius, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022)
In Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, Kathryn Olivarius examines the intersection of yellow fever epidemics, race, socioeconomic class, and political power in antebellum New Orleans. Instead of creating opportunity for social or cultural change, the disease created the basis for a hierarchy that benefited from resisting change and perpetuating inequalities. She convincingly argues that White New Orleanians claimed their supposed immunity proved their superiority which they then utilized for economic and political gain. Any immunity of those enslaved, on the other hand, provided continued support for slave-based capitalism and exploitation of new immigrants.
Her impressive use of archival materials provides a window into understanding the connections among disease, race, economics, and politics from multiple angles. Necropolis is a fascinating and highly original contribution to the field.
2022 > For a first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
2022 > Brooke M. Bauer, Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540-1840(The University of Alabama Press)
Brooke M. Bauer’s Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 is a deeply feminist work which tells the history of women who maintained the Catawba Nation. Bauer shows how Catawba women stewarded their ancestral lands in the Carolinas, stressing their role as water keepers, and how they sustained their Nation’s beliefs through cultural production and pedagogical practices.
Drawing on the methods of women’s history, ethnohistory, and environmental history, Bauer decolonized the archives that often obscured the presence, let alone the role that women played in the community. Using pottery, letters, maps, oral tradition, oral history, materials culture, museum and archeological artifacts, she artfully traced the intricate role that women played in the nation building process. Thanks to her intimate and distinct knowledge of the language, her work highlights how these women safeguarded the survival of the Catawba people and their identity.
Honorable Mention: 2022 > Christine Taitano DeLisle, Placental Politics: CHamoru women, White Womanhood, and Indigeneity under US Colonialism in Guam (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).
An important contribution that centers indigenous CHamoru women’s experiences in analyzing power relations under US colonialism in Guam. DeLisle’s work is methodologically expansive whereby she uses wide-ranging sources to craft the historical narrative drawing upon oral histories, letters, photographs, and military records. Her work highlights the complex interactions across race, class, gender, indigeneity in the making of colonial and postcolonial Guam society, beyond trauma.
This work extends the discussion on indigenous sovereignty highlighting the work CHamora women performed as stewards of land and bodies. In claiming their bodies and placentas, these women fought to simultaneously control their bodies and their lands, pushing back against the violence that was visited upon their physical bodies and their lands. The author fleshes out the connection between the two and in doing so allows for the resilience and agency of CHamoru women to be illuminated in the past and into the present. Moreover, Delisle’s work centers reproduction as a lens for examining the past, allowing readers to recognize that even as this was an embattled ground, subaltern groups found creative ways to retain bodily and cultural integrity in the face of colonial violence.
Honorable Mention: 2022 > Sarah Mellors Rodriguez, Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
This study is a careful mapping of the changing history and landscape of reproduction across modern Chinese history from 1911-2021. The author charts the shifts from pro-natal to anti-natal, back ( in the more contemporaneous times) to pro-natalist state policies and politics. It is a great read in allowing us to recognize competing histories of reproductive politics across time and space. Similar to DeLisle’s work Mellors-Rodriguez highlights how centrally state politics are determined through reproductive imperatives, which are tied to ever-evolving modernist ideals of progress and economic development.
2021
2021 > For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
Shahla Hussain, Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
Hussain’s work offers one of the first historical accounts of post-Partition society and politics in Kashmir, a region that has been categorized as a conflict zone ever since the creation of India and Pakistan in 1947. Because of its status as a disputed territory, Kashmir has been studied mainly by scholars of political science or international relations. It also figures prominently in global policy literature focusing on issues of national security and sovereignty.
In contrast, this monograph centers on Kashmiri people, social structures, and the ever-evolving idiom of Kashmiri politics. In particular, Hussain’s book examines the meanings inherent in the resilient yet controversial slogan of azadi (freedom), demonstrating an innovative approach to nation building. By emphasizing the limitations of modern political categories such as territoriality, sovereignty, and nation state, the book offers a critique of colonial and post-colonial political maternities in South Asia.
Kashmir in the Aftermath, moreover, demonstrates archival ingenuity; the author created an “alternative archive for reconstructing the Kashmiri consciousness” based on ethnographies to center people’s historical memory. Hussain’s work is a well-researched and well-argued book on a global region that has witnessed extraordinary human sufferings in the past seventy-five years and yet has received negligible scholarly attention.
Honorable Mention: 2021 > Alaina E. Roberts, I’ve Been Here All The While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Roberts’ book examines the connections between slavery, freedom and settler colonialism in Indian territory from the long nineteenth century. Using family history throughout the narrative, Roberts challenges the established definitions and boundaries of key concepts that have been taken for granted in recent scholarship—settler colonialism, Reconstruction, citizenship, and freedom. Through a well-researched study, she unpacks the complexity of the exchanges and meanings of freedom, without shying away from difficult decisions on land claims, violence, “civilizing” and economic processes, claims of citizenship, and reparations. Roberts not only challenges our understanding of Reconstruction as a political process which focused on African American civil rights, she also adds to our understanding of the History of the West, with a focus on the tense relationship between African American and Natives rights and federal intervention.
Honorable Mention: 2021 > Corinna Zeltsman, Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (University of California Press, 2021)
At the crossroads of intellectual and social history, this study changes our understanding of how individuals harnessed the power of print to make political claims. Zeltsman shows that printers were intellectuals, not mere typesetters, or technicians. This from-below perspective challenges the historiographical bias towards writers and politicians, as if they alone participated in the liberal projects to build republics after the age of revolutions in the 19th-century Atlantic world. She shows that printing shops were akin to the cafes and salons usually evoked in histories of the public sphere. There, people with ink-colored hands formulated and debated ideas about citizenship, casting themselves as critical actors in the rise of the new state. Innovative as well is the reconstruction of the workings of these shops and her evocation of the work required to produce newsprint. Focused on Mexico, the study’s findings have implications for the engagement of non-elites in post-colonial states in other parts of the world.
2021 > For a first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
2021 > Sara T. Damiano, To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities (Johns Hopkins Press, 2021).
Damiano’s book explores the gendered politics of credit and legal practices in eighteenth-century New England. Damiano’s work engages and revises such established academic modes of analysis as the public and private divide, and at its core the very notion of the household. She demonstrates that, in eighteenth-century British America, the household was a “public, heterosocial space” and, likewise, that the public space did not stop at the threshold of the household. In doing so, she challenges our understanding of the development of capitalism by centering the transformative role that women played in the economic development of cities such as Boston and Newport and the British Atlantic world more generally.
The work is rigorously researched, conceptually generative, and carefully thought-through with laser-sharp analysis. The author’s close reading of the sources allowed her to offer a vibrant and accessible narrative which conveys complex and sophisticated ideas that capture the reader. The book, which recasts the debates on patriarchy and the role of women in colonial economic spaces, will influence scholarly debates beyond its field’s boundaries.
2021 Honorable Mention > Suzanne Kahn, Divorce American Style: Fighting for Women’s Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Kahn’s book examines why and how feminist divorce reformers—women who had lost their political, economic, and cultural status following their divorce—joined feminist organizations to advocate for change and for the expansion of their relationship to the state through benefits such as social security, child support, and property rights. This rigorously researched and conceptually generative study invites scholars to rethink and revise the way we think about Second Wave Feminism, particularly in terms of its chronology and the issues and actors that propelled it. The study highlights the generative concept that marriage, and in parallel divorce, was “a political and politicizing institution.” This new account shows that the 1970s feminist agenda extended well into the 1980s, which will force scholars to rethink the temporality of the women’s rights movement.
2020
2020 > 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 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.
2020> For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
This year’s submissions were particularly diverse and interesting. For 2020, the committee chose to award the Berks book prize to two recipients: Gina Anne Tam for Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 and Alice L. Baumgartner for South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War.
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.
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
2019 > For a first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
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).
2019> For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
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
2018 > For a first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
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.
2018> For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
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).
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 that 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
2017 > For a first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
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.
2017> For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
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
2016 > For a first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
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.
2016> For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
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
2015 > For a first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
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.
2015> For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
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
2014 > For a first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
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.
2014> For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
Tatiana Seijas. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: from Chinos to Indians. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
2013
2013 > For a first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
Camille Robcis, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in Twentieth-Century France, Cornell University Press, 2013.
2013> For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
Teresa Barnett, Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America, University of Chicago Press, 2013.
2012
2012> For a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality
Françoise N. Hamlin, Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II, University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
