The American Historical Association Named This Year's Prize Winners — Look at All These Good Books

Here's hoping the Chinese editions come soon!

On October 10, the American Historical Association announced this year's prize winners — more than 30 awards in all.

Among them, Yale professor John Merriman and University of Pennsylvania professor Richard S. Dunn won the association's lifetime achievement award for historians.

Born in 1946, John Merriman is an authority on modern European and French history, and the author of History of Modern Europe, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune and The Stones of Balazuc: A French Village in Time, among other books. He also built two widely followed open courses at Yale, "France Since 1871" and "European Civilization: 1648–1945," and won a Yale teaching award in 2000.

Richard S. Dunn, 89 this year, has spent most of his career on early America, and founded the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Sugar and Slaves, A Tale of Two Plantations and The Age of Religious Wars, 1559-1715.

The John K. Fairbank Prize went to Vietnam: A New History, a new book by Christopher Goscha, a history professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal in Canada. The prize goes specifically to books on East Asian history after the 19th century. Vietnam: A New History tells of Vietnam's tangled past and of how China, France, Japan and other countries shaped the Vietnam we know today, covering more than 2,000 years from the Baiyue period to the present.

This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy took the book prize for American history. It shows how, before the Civil War, Southern slaveholders controlled the country's foreign policy along with its economic and territorial expansion.

The book prizes for European history went to Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community and Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire, among others. The first tells of the upheaval and suffering visited on the residents of a village of 2,000 people after September 1941; the second, of how heavily the British government leaned on the science of the mind in the early 20th century — its author sets out to trace how psychology opened new possibilities for governing the British Empire.

Beyond the history books, the American Historical Association also gave its film awards to Free State of Jones and I Am Not Your Negro. The first, based on true events, tells how, during the Civil War, the Mississippian Newton Knight deserted the Confederate army, gathered a band of soldiers and set up a country in his home region called the "Free State of Jones." He married a Black enslaved woman and refused to return to Confederate service, and he freed enslaved people inside Mississippi, Confederate territory. The second is a documentary about the life and work of the African American writer James Baldwin.

The American Historical Association is the largest and oldest body of professional historians in the United States, founded in 1884. Its stated purpose is to advance historical research and teaching, and to preserve historical materials and keep them available to researchers. This year's prizes will be handed out in January 2018, at the association's 132nd annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Appendix: A Partial List of Prizes Awarded by the American Historical Association

Books:

The Herbert Baxter Adams Prize (European history before 1815)

Max Bergholz (Concordia Univ.) for Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell Univ. Press, 2016)

The George Louis Beer Prize (European international history after 1895)

Erik Linstrum (Univ. of Virginia) for Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard Univ. Press, 2016)

The Jerry Bentley Prize (world history)

Jeffrey James Byrne (Univ. of British Columbia) for Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016)

The Albert J. Beveridge Award (history of the Americas after Columbus)

David A. Chang (Univ. of Minnesota) for The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2016)

The James Henry Breasted Prize (history before 1000 CE)

Alain Bresson (Univ. of Chicago) and Steven Rendall, trans. (freelance) for The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States (Princeton Univ. Press, 2016)

The John H. Dunning Prize (American history)

Matthew Karp (Princeton Univ.) for This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard Univ. Press, 2016)

The John K. Fairbank Prize (East Asian history after the 19th century)

Christopher Goscha (Univ. du Québec à Montréal) for Vietnam: A New History (Basic Books, 2016)

The Morris D. Forkosch Prize (British history after the Wars of the Roses)

Laura A. M. Stewart (Univ. of York, UK) for Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–1651 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016)

The Leo Gershoy Award (Western European history in the 17th–18th centuries)

Renaud Morieux (Univ. of Cambridge) for The Channel: England, France, and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016)

The Friedrich Katz Prize (Latin American and Caribbean history)

Jane E. Mangan (Davidson Coll.) for Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016)

The Joan Kelly Memorial Prize (women's history)

Sarah Haley (UCLA) for No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2016)

The Martin A. Klein Prize (African history)

Mustafah Dhada (California State Univ., Bakersfield) for The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964–2013 (Bloomsbury, 2016)

The Littleton-Griswold Prize (American law and society)

Risa Goluboff (Univ. of Virginia Sch. of Law) for Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016)

The J. Russell Major Prize (French history)

Rafe Blaufarb (Florida State Univ.) for The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016)

The Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize (Italian history and Italian-American relations)

Paul Garfinkel (Simon Fraser Univ.) for Criminal Law in Liberal and Fascist Italy (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016)

The George L. Mosse Prize (European intellectual and cultural history since the 16th century)

James T. Kloppenberg (Harvard Univ.) for Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016)

Film:

The John E. O'Connor Film Award (historical film and television)

Documentary: I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck, director; Rémi Grellety and Hébert Peck, producers (Velvet Film, 2016)

Dramatic Feature: Free State of Jones, Gary Ross, director; Jon Kilik and Scott Stuber, producers (Bluegrass Films, Larger Than Life Productions, Route One Entertainment, and Vendian Entertainment, 2016)

People:

Lifetime Achievement Award: for the lifetime scholarly achievement of senior historians

Richard S. Dunn (Univ. of Pennsylvania)

John Merriman (Yale Univ.)

Cover image: a still from Free State of Jones, via Douban