The Society of American Historians Awards James Grossman, Jon Grinspan, Brinda Charry, and Joshua Lappen
April 15, NEW YORK, N.Y.—Four 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 12. 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 6th annual Tony Horwitz Prize honoring distinguished work in American history of wide appeal and enduring public significance is awarded to James R. Grossman.
James R. Grossman is executive director of the American Historical Association, the largest professional association of historians in the world. A scholar of African-American history and the author of two award-winning books, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900–1929, he is a fierce advocate for the crucial role of historical thinking in public life. With his insistence that clear historical writing can shape public policy in important ways and his strong support for historians working in a broad range of venues, he exemplifies the SAH’s mission to bring good historical writing to the largest possible audience.
Prior to joining the AHA, Grossman was vice president for research and education at the Newberry Library and project director and co-editor of the print and digital Encyclopedia of Chicago. He also served as editor of the series Historical Studies of Urban America, for some 50 volumes. A master of the short essay, he is a frequent newspaper contributor and for the past fifteen years has used his column in the monthly AHA newsmagazine to argue powerfully for the proposition that History Matters.
Grossman has taken an unusually broad view of the work of a Learned Society, positioning the AHA as a group that champions the cause of history within the academy and well beyond. He has used his position at the AHA to support historians in K-12 classrooms, colleges and universities, museums and government agencies. He has pushed for a broad definition of historical scholarship that includes (but is not limited to) textbooks, official histories, reference books, op-eds, blog posts, magazine articles, museum exhibitions, public lectures, congressional testimony, oral history projects, expert witness testimony, media appearances, podcasts, and historical games.
For his writing and advocacy for the historical profession, the Society of American Historians is pleased to honor James Grossman 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 69th annual Francis Parkman Prize is awarded to Jon Grinspan for Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War (Bloomsbury).
The first detailed study of one of the Civil War’s most fascinating subjects: the Wide Awakes, a grassroots political club that helped propel Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in one of the most consequential elections in American history.
In his vivid and beautifully written book, Grinspan takes readers to textile shops, where young working-class men sewed cloaks and stored stolen torches, and to city streets, where they marched against the Slave Power and protected Republican campaign speakers. Bringing to bear his expertise in material culture, Grinspan deftly interweaves the Wide Awakes’ personal stories with a broader narrative of political power in an era of sectional rancor and violence. He shows us that the work of ordinary people was vital to the coming of the Civil War, and reminds us of the power of performative politics. Charting the history of the Wide Awakes, he asks, “Where, exactly, is the line between symbol and meaning, free speech and public menace, politics and violence?”
Original in its topic and riveting in its narrative style, Wide Awake represents the best of today’s historical writing.
Jon Grinspan is the Curator of Political History at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. His three books, and many New York Times articles, explore the deep history of American democracy, focusing on campaign spectacles, forgotten youth movements, and dirty tricks. At the Smithsonian, he collects artifacts from historic moments and contemporary political events to preserve America's past, and present, for museum-goers of the future.
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 18th Biennial SAH Prize for Historical Fiction is awarded to Brinda Charry for The East Indian (Scribner).
Within the obscure 1635 records of a prosperous Virginia planter named George Menefie resides a tantalizing historical fragment: a reference to a man named “Tony”—likely an indentured servant—born in the “East Indies” (today’s Indian subcontinent). In her exquisite and moving novel, The East Indian, Brinda Charry expands upon this elliptical archival find, imagining a complete life story for the elusive “Tony”—and by extension the other South Asians like him that ended up in Jamestown in the colony’s early years. The result is a picaresque tale that charts the varied voyages of a boy born to a Tamil mother in the coastal village of Armagon, site of one of the English East India Company’s first forts in South Asia. As the tides of history sweep over him, he is wrenched from his home and deposited across the ocean in London before finally washing up on the Virginia shore, where he labors in the tobacco fields alongside a motley collection of unfree laborers from Africa and Great Britain.
As the lone “East Indian” in a colonial society increasingly defined by a strict divide between white and Black, Tony begins his stay in Jamestown as the quintessential outsider. But as his encounters with the land and its peoples deepen, he eventually comes to think of America as his home—the place where he will be born again, will set down roots, and even start a family. “Like a snail,” Tony muses, “I will carry home on my back, find it where I happen to be, make it from what I bear inside me.” In telling Tony’s story, Brinda Charry offers us no less than a new origin story for America, a richly detailed panorama of loss, pain, struggle, and new beginnings.
Born and raised in India, Brinda Charry came to the United States in 1999 to pursue a doctorate in English literature at Syracuse University. She currently teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire.
The SAH Prize for Historical Fiction is awarded biennially in odd-numbered years for a book of historical fiction on an American subject that makes a significant contribution to historical understanding, portrays authentically the people and events of the historical past, and displays skills in narrative construction and prose style.
The 59th annual Allan Nevins Prize is awarded to Joshua Lappen (Oxford University) for his dissertation, “Cultures of Power: Electrification, Politics, and Visibility in Greater Los Angeles.”
The largest public gathering in Los Angeles history celebrated neither a military victory nor a baseball championship but rather the completion of a long-distance electric power line. On an October night in 1936, a million people jammed the streets to watch a ten-foot spark arc across a purpose-built tower. Meanwhile, spotlights swept the skies and illuminated floats paraded the streets, all to mark 266 miles of newly strung wire delivering hydropower from what was then called Boulder Dam.
Joshua Lappen uses this moment of technofrenzy to grab our attention on the first page of his beautifully written dissertation. Even more artfully, he takes us on an exploration of how the technology feted that night had shaped the development of Los Angeles and Southern California since the early 1880s. Towering arc lights and the cables that powered them preceded the development of new neighborhoods. Electric streetcars followed the wires and demanded ever more power. Dams and aqueducts delivered not only water but kilowatts. The results went far beyond infrastructure, creating a distinctive regional identity around electric light and power as markers of progress and modernity.
All of this did not just happen. The rise of what Lappen calls “electric visibility” led to massive accumulations of wealth and political influence, reinforced by a publicity apparatus that spread the gospel of electrical bounty. But visibility coexisted with an “invisibility” that masked political corruption, social inequality, and environmental degradation even as it disguised power stations as private homes or public monuments. After World War II, invisibility came to triumph over visibility, not least because utility companies found it profitable to retreat from a skeptical public’s attention. As Lappen puts it, electric utilities “began to practice the unfamiliar art of obscuring, rather than highlighting, their electrical systems and electricity itself, seeking to transform a fading icon of Angeleno identity into an infrastructural product defined by its silence and ubiquity, and denoted only by its absence.” The retreat was so complete that the revelry of 1936 now seems as if it must have happened on another planet. Or so it would seem except for Lappen’s indefatigable research, dynamic analysis, compelling prose, and narrative flair.
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.
There were two finalists for the Nevins Prize: Julia Brown-Bernstein (USC), “Liberalizing Belonging: Race, Service, and the Making of the Post-Industrial San Fernando Valley,” and Kaitlin Simpson (Tennessee), “Flowers of El Dorado: Gender, Production, and the Cut Flower Industry in the United States and Colombia, 1908-Present.”