Society of American Historians
The Society of American Historians at Columbia University gave three prizes to honor scholars for historical writing of exceptional literary merit:
William Cronon, a professor of history, geography, and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of Changes in the Land (Hill and Wang, 2003), Nature’s Metropolis (W.W. Norton, 1991), and the blog Scholar as Citizen, received the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Award, given jointly with the Roosevelt Institute, for distinguished writing in American history of enduring public significance.
Joe Jackson, a professor of creative writing at Old Dominion University, in Virginia, received the Francis Parkman Prize, given for a nonfiction work of history on an American theme published the previous year, for his biography Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Isaiah Lorado Wilner, a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, won the Allan Nevins Prize, given for the best-written doctoral dissertation on an American subject, for “Raven Cried for Me: Narratives of Transformation on the Northwest Coast of America.” He earned a Ph.D. in history at Yale University.
Organization of American Historians
The following are the academics and a museum director who received the Organization of American Historians’ 2017 awards.
Ian Michael Baldwin, an adjunct lecturer at the University of Redlands, in California, received the John D’Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award for “Family, Housing, and the Political Geography of Gay Liberation in Los Angeles County, 1960-1986.”
Susanna Blumenthal, co-director of the law and history program at the University of Minnesota Law School, received the Merle Curti Award, in the intellectual-history category, for Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard University Press).
Lonnie G. Bunch III, founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, received the Friend of History Award, in recognition of his support for historical research and its presentation to the public.
Catherine Collomp, a professor emerita at the Université Paris-Diderot, received the Willi Paul Adams Award for Résister au nazisme: Le Jewish Labor Committee, New York, 1934-1945.
Linda Gordon, a professor of history at New York University, received the 2017 Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award, for significant contributions to the understanding and appreciation of American history.
LaShawn Harris, an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University, received the Darlene Clark Hine Award for Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (University of Illinois Press).
Karl Jacoby, a professor of history at Columbia University, received the Ray Allen Billington Prize for his book The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (W.W. Norton).
Max Krochmal, an assistant professor of history at Texas Christian University, received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for his book Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press).
Sam Lebovic, an assistant professor of history at George Mason University, in Virginia, received the Ellis W. Hawley Prize for Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America (Harvard University Press).
Ryan Patrick Murphy, an assistant professor of history at Earlham College, in Indiana, received the David Montgomery Award for Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice (Temple University Press).
Robert G. Parkinson, a professor of American history at Binghamton University of the State University of New York system, was awarded the James A. Rawley Prize for his book The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Omohundro Institute of Early American History).
Ava Purkiss, an assistant professor of American culture and women’s studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, received the Lerner-Scott Prize, for the best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women’s history, for " ‘Mind, Soul, Body, and Race’: Black Women’s Purposeful Exercise in the Age of Physical Culture, 1900-1939.”
Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, received the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (Oxford University Press).
Manisha Sinha, a professor of American history at the University of Connecticut, won the Avery O. Craven Award for The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press).
Yael A. Sternhell, an assistant professor of history and American studies at Tel Aviv University, received the Binkley-Stephenson Award, given for the best article to appear in the Journal of American History during the preceding calendar year, for “The Afterlives of a Confederate Archive: Civil War Documents and the Making of Sectional Reconciliation” (March 2016).
John Troutman, an associate professor of history and geography at the University of Louisiana and curator of American music at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, received the Lawrence W. Levine Award for Kika Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music (University of North Carolina Press).
Katherine Turk, an assistant professor of history and an adjunct assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was awarded the Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History for Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (University of Pennsylvania Press).
Wendy Warren, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University, received the Merle Curti Award, in the social-history category, for her book New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (Liveright Publishing).
Other awards
Alvin Plantinga, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, was named the 2017 Templeton Prize Laureate by the John Templeton Foundation, in recognition of the influence his writing has had on the acceptance among academic philosophers of religiously informed philosophy. The prize carries a cash award of about $1.4 million.