The Society of American Historians Awards Nell Painter, Bench Ansfield, and Adelaide Mandeville
April 15, NEW YORK, N.Y.—Three prizes honoring historical work of exceptional merit are announced by the Society of American Historians (SAH) at Columbia University, ahead of its annual dinner at The Century Association in New York City on May 11. The Society, founded in 1939 by Allan Nevins, an American journalist and historian, encourages and promotes literary distinction in the writing and presentation of American history. The Society’s members – by invitation only – consist of scholars, journalists, documentarians, filmmakers, essayists, novelists, biographers and poets.
The 7th annual Tony Horwitz Prize honoring distinguished work in American history of wide appeal and enduring public significance is awarded to Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University.
Professor Painter is the author of nine books, including the New York Times bestseller The History of White People and the National Critics Circle finalist Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Guggenheim Foundation, she has received honorary degrees from institutions such as Yale, Wesleyan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Dartmouth and has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. After earning her Ph.D. in history from Harvard, she earned degrees in painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2024, Doubleday published her essay collection I Just Keep Talking, named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Kirkus Reviews. She is working on a new book on Sojourner Truth, entitled Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker, and She Didn’t Say That. This new biographical study includes a chapter on Sojourner Truth as a knitter. Painter is the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Winner for 2026.
In recognition of her long record of outstanding work, the Society of American Historians is pleased to honor Nell Irvin Painter with the Tony Horwitz Prize.
The prize, supported by The Cedars Foundation, honors the Society’s treasured colleague and former president, Tony Horwitz, who died in 2019. Horwitz, a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a former staff writer for the New Yorker, and a distinguished historian whose distinctive voice was marked by surpassing humanity and grace.
The 70th annual Francis Parkman Prize is awarded to Bench Ansfield for Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (W. W. Norton).
Bench Ansfield’s Born in Flames tackles the mystery of the wave of arsons in 1970’s New York City with the curiosity of an avid detective, and comes away with an elegant social, economic and political analysis. Ansfield shows how federal fire insurance created a perverse incentive for landlords to burn buildings, part of the predatory economy breaking down Black and Brown communities in this era. Written with verve and confidence, Ansfield animates Born in Flame’s structural explanation with rich human stories from fire victims and local students, activists and artists, cultural interpreters and even the incendiary “torches” themselves.
Ansfield’s mobile prose drives home a thesis that encompasses both history’s unintended consequences and society’s underlying biases. This refined balance turns the potentially dry subject of fire insurance history into a searing account of government carelessness and urban greed, cultural blame and human disaster.
Bench Ansfield is an assistant professor of history at Temple University. They are a historian of racial capitalism, the carceral state, and twentieth-century U.S. cities. Their dissertation also won the Society of American Historians' Allan Nevins prize in 2022.
The Parkman Prize, named for a 19th-century historian widely recognized for his elegant prose style, is awarded annually to a nonfiction book that is distinguished by its literary merit and makes an important contribution to the history of what is now the United States.
The 61st annual Allan Nevins Prize is awarded to Adelaide Mandeville (Ph.D., Harvard University) for her dissertation, “Changes in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of Weather Control in the Twentieth-Century United States”
Adelaide Mandeville’s dissertation is a striking and imaginative account of twentieth-century American efforts to master the atmosphere. From its opening pages, the dissertation announces its narrative power: it begins with a meteorologist who published a book “right before he disappeared,” a line that immediately pulls the reader into a story that is as much about human ambition and uncertainty as it is about science. That sense of narrative control never falters. Drawing on an extraordinary archive—newspapers and popular media, government and corporate records, scientific reports, legal proceedings, and personal papers—Mandeville reconstructs a world in which the weather became an object of ambition, anxiety, and experiment.
Her central argument is both elegant and unsettling: weather control marked the high point of modern faith in the human capacity to dominate nature, but also revealed the limits of that ambition. Americans sought to rationalize, militarize, and commodify the skies, yet control remained elusive and deeply contested. What endures instead is a more troubling reality—while people failed to control the weather, they had already begun to alter the climate itself.
Mandeville has a remarkable gift for finding telling vignettes that animate a vast and complex history: a man racing to deliver a valise full of lawsuits from Catskills residents fearful of cloud-seeding rains; a “rainmaker” appearing on national television, his profession so recognizable that it is quickly guessed by a game-show panel. The result is a work of impressive range and originality, at once deeply researched and compellingly written, that reshapes our understanding of environmental history, the history of science, and the enduring problem of human attempts to control the natural world.
Adelaide Mandeville is an interdisciplinary U.S. historian, who received her PhD in American Studies at Harvard and is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California.
The jury also recognized a finalist for the Nevins: Charlotte Hecht (Ph.D., Yale University) for her dissertation, “American Nuclear: A Convergent History of Landscape and Power.”
The Allan Nevins Prize, named for the Society’s founder, is awarded annually for the best-written doctoral dissertation on an American subject. The winning dissertation will be published by one of the publisher members of the Society.