1988 Awards for Scholarly Distinction
At the annual meeting in Cincinnati, OH, last December, Helen G. Edmonds, Sylvia L. Thrupp Strayer, and Edwin O. Reischauer were the recipients of the AHA’s Awards for Scholarly Distinction. Following are the citations read by President-elect Louis R. Harlan at the Presentation Ceremony:
Helen G. Edmonds is uniquely deserving of the 1988 Award for Scholarly Distinction. Her noteworthy accomplishments as a scholar, teacher, and academic administrator are sufficient alone to warrant this recognition. In 1946, Helen G. Edmonds became the first black woman to earn the Ph.D. degree in history at the Ohio State University. She is the author of the now classic study, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, published in 1951 by the University of North Carolina Press. During her thirty-six years association with North Carolina Central University from 1941 to 1977, Dr. Edmonds inspired twenty-five undergraduates to seek and obtain Ph.D. degrees in history and the social sciences. In 1977 the scholars returned and established in her honor, The Helen G. Edmonds Graduate Colloquium of History at North Carolina Central University.
Her commitment to academic excellence and considerable leadership talents led to several administrative appointments including chair of the department of history and dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. She has also established a record of state and federal government service, and was the first black woman in history to second the nomination of a candidate for the presidency of the United States, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in August 1956.
In the ten years since her retirement from North Carolina Central, Dr. Edmonds has been a Distinguished Professor at Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been an invited lecturer at more than 100 colleges and universities in this country and abroad and has received 8 honorary degrees.
Dr. Helen Edmonds is an outstanding historian who has become a living legend and a national treasure. She is held in the highest esteem and devotion, especially by members of the black professoriate, a goodly number of whom owe more to her than she, or they, will ever know.
Born in England, Sylvia L. Thrupp Strayer was raised in British Columbia and took her B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of British Columbia. She received her doctorate from the University of London in 1931and was a postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics from 1931 to 1933; her research then continued with a fellowship from the Social Sciences Research Council from 1933 to 1935. She taught at the University of British Columbia (1935–1944), the University of Toronto (1944–45) and the University of Chicago (1945–61) and was a visiting professor at the universities of Iowa and Wisconsin before accepting a chair as Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History at the University of Michigan in 1961.
For over fifty years, Sylvia Thrupp Strayer has been a major figure in the study of medieval England and medieval Europe generally. Her works on the social and economic life of late medieval England are classics. Most worthy of note in this respect is The Merchant Class of Medieval London. As has been noted in her Festschrift (which includes critiques by Philippe Wolff, Edward Shils, Eric R. Wolf, M. M. Postan, and Thomas Cochran), her essays have touched and influenced the many new lines of social history. Her founding and editing of the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History has placed medieval studies in the heart of this massive interdisciplinary work in North America.
Edwin O. Reischauer is lauded tonight both for his scholarly distinction as the outstanding pioneer in the legitimatization of the field of Japanese history in American academe as well as for his distinguished public service climaxed by his landmark career as United States Ambassador to Japan, 1961–1966. His service at Harvard began with his appointment as instructor in 1938 and continued with interruptions for government service until his retirement as university professor in 1981. His many outstanding publications have encompassed esoteric scholarly investigations of the Japanese language and early Japanese history as well as his recent policy-oriented monographs and his autobiography.
He has served our profession with vigor and commitment in alerting nearly three generations of Americans to the signal significance of Japan in the world in general and of U.S. Japanese relations in particular. He has labored unceasingly to communicate to the American public at large, through lectures, videos, and his writings, his vast knowledge of Japanese culture and society.
In 1988 the field of Asian history in general as well as the more specialized field of Japanese history are recognized major components of academic history as understood by the AHA. The Nominating Committee and the Council of the AHA felt that this reality could largely be attributed to the singular role played in our world by Professor Edwin Reischbauer.
The Eugene L. Asher Distinguished Teaching Award
In 1986 the AHA’s Teaching Division recommended and the Council approved the establishment of an annual Distinguished Teaching Award to recognize both excellence in teaching techniques and knowledge of the subject of history. While the AHA has traditionally recognized outstanding scholarship since the founding of the AHA in 1884, there has been no prize honoring teaching. Through this award, the Association hopes to enhance the visibility and status of great teachers of history.
The Teaching Division serves as a jury, reviewing nominations submitted by the previous year’s book prize winners, who serve as a nominating panel. Each proposes a teacher, who by inspirational impact and excellence in content and presentation “turned on that prize winner to the study of history. Eligible for nomination are school, undergraduate, and graduate instructors. Thesis advisers, due to their special relationship with their advisees, are excluded from consideration.
In May, 1988, the AHA Council endorsed a Teaching Division recommendation that the first award of the new teaching prize be named the Eugene L. Asher Distinguished Teaching Award in recognition of Dr. Asher’s contributions to the profession of history, the AHA, and the Society for History Education. At the December 27, 1988 meeting, the Council accepted an offer to cosponsor the award with the Society for History Education.
Joan Connell, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Xavier University, was awarded the 1988 Eugene L. Asher Distinguished Teaching Award at the AHA’s General Meeting held in Cincinnati. Dr. Connell was nominated by Lawrence McBride, assistant professor of history, Illinois State University, co recipient of the 1987 Robinson Prize, who read portions of the nominating letter at the Presentation Ceremony at the annual meeting in Cincinnati.
“Dr. Joan Connell changed my life. In 1968, I was teaching sixth grade in a Chicago area public school. Like dozens of my friends, I decided to work towards a master’s degree in order to move across the salary lines. I chose history because I liked teaching it and because I had always been interested in it, even though I only had nine hours of history as an undergraduate.
“I returned to Chicago Teachers College for night classes and began plugging away—prerequisites first. . . . Three years later, Dr. Connell arrived at CTC fresh from the University of Chicago. The first class she taught was to be my last in the M.A. program. No books, she said, just research and write about four to six pages per week for the next sixteen weeks. About half the class dropped that night; twelve of us stayed on board for the ride.
“What a ride it turned out to be. Every week, there was red ink everywhere on the drafts. Always, questions: from verbs to ideas. She sent us to the Harper Library at the University of Chicago and to the Newberry Library in downtown Chicago. We started to talk to people there—historians—who were interested in our research projects. Slowly, we began to start to think like working historians, too….
“Dr. Connell’s seminar was a turning point in my life. The final paper probably wasn’t that good—although I still have it—but her teaching and example started me thinking seriously about history as a career. When the course was over, I mentioned that I’d like to apply to the nearby University of Chicago, never dreaming that I could actually get into that scary place. But she encouraged me to apply. She helped me set up some interviews with her mentors. I was admitted, in 1972, and for the next six years she watched my progress with a gentle interest. Dr. Connell never advised and never interfered, yet she was always ready to pick up my spirits, especially in the first and second years. I didn’t see too much of her after that, but when I received the degree in 1978, Dr. Connell was there, with a five-volume Macauley. The real gift, of course, had been given seven years earlier….
“Joan Connell’s career has progressed steadily from Chicago Teachers College. She is now Vice President for Academic Affairs at Xavier University in Ohio. I was fortunate to have been in the right place at the start of her career. Her teaching that year marked a new beginning for both of us.”
Honorable mentions for 1988 were: Robert Darnton, Princeton University; Burdette C. Poland, Pomona College; Paul D. Raymond, The Northwest School, Seattle, Washington; and Neelak Tjernagal, Concordia College.
1988 Book Awards
At the annual meeting in Cincinnati, the following prizes were announced for the year 1988. The committees’ citations are recorded below:
George Louis Beer Prize
Michael J. Hogan, Ohio State University, for The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). In this scholarly and wide-ranging study, Dr. Hogan provides both an original and an authoritative interpretation of the Marshall Plan. While it undoubtedly shaped the integrated Western Europe of today, its origins lie in the New Deal, allowing Dr. Hogan convincingly to portray Europe as “remade the American way” after 1945.
Albert J. Beveridge Award
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James LeLoudis, Robert Korstad of the Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Christopher Daly, Brookline, Massachusetts; Lu Ann Jones, National Museum of American History; and Mary Murphy, Butte-Silver Bow Archives, for Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). The Beveridge Award is given to Like a Family in recognition of its significant contribution to the fields of southern history, working class history, and American social history; in admiration of its literary style; in appreciation of its merit as a collaborative scholarly enterprise; and in acknowledgement of its success in integrating oral testimony and critical analysis, with respect for the integrity of each.
James Henry Breasted Prize
Erich S. Gruen, University of California, Berkeley, for The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Age of Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Erich S. Gruen’s The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome is a genuine tour de force, based upon an excellent handling of the evidence. There is every reason to think that his case for the persistence of Hellenistic ways is bound to alter the general understanding of the real birth of the Roman “empire.”
John H. Dunning Prize
Joseph E. Stevens, Santa Fe, New Mexico, for Hoover Dam: An American Adventure (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). Hoover Dam by Joseph E. Stevens is social history at its best-meticulously documented, masterfully argued, and beautifully written. Using the mighty Colorado River at Black Canyon as his set, Stevens skillful ly constructs a moving historical narrative which illuminates the complex behavior and motives of the capitalists involved in financing the dam, the barbarous conditions workers braved to construct the dam, and the technological innovations which made the project possible.
John K. Fairbank Prize
Sheldon Garon, Princeton University, for The State and Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). This book is a remarkably insightful, intensely stimulating, and elegantly written reinterpretation of the role of the state in modern Japanese industrial relations. Relying overwhelmingly on an impressively broad spectrum of Japanese language sources, Professor Garon presents a highly original examination of the complex interplay among organized labor, bureaucratic cli ques, and party government, emphasizing divisions among career bureaucrats and the often constructive role they sought to play in social change.
Herbert Feis Award
Larry E. Tise, American Association for State and Local History, for Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). In this thoroughly researched and forcefully argued work, Larry Tise debunks popular myths about proslavery thought by a skillful blend of narrative, quantitative, and comparative historical analysis. He demonstrates that the defense of slavery was not a regional aberration on the part of the slaveholding South, but a pervasive national phenomenon emanating from New England, entirely consistent with an integral part of the American political tradition. Tise’s insightful study challenges us to abandon such convenient stereotypical categories as North versus South and to reassess the nature and character of antebellum American society.
Leo Gershoy Award
Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, England, for Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). The Leo Gershoy Award for 1988 is presented to Roy Porter for an original and imaginative study of madness in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book tests the thesis of Michel Foucault that madhouses down to the nineteenth century were simply repressive instruments of social control designed to protect affluent society against social nuisances and finds it wanting in the English situation. Porter’s book is a very impressive combining of intellectual with social and political history, which confronts broad and important problems. The book is meticulously researched and elegantly written and makes fascinating reading.
Joan Kelly Memorial Prize
Linda Gordon, University of Wisconsin, Madison, for Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960 (New York: Viking Press,1988). This sensitive study of family violence in Boston is an impressive piece of research and writing. It is richly detailed history rooted in archival materials. And it is an original and important interpretation of the complex politics of family violence in its class, gender, and ethnic dimensions. Gordon’s book is at once a contribution to women’s history and feminist theory. One of its great strengths is that it insists on the many sides to the story of attempts to reform and deal with family violence, refuting simple notions of “social control” or class domination. Another strength is that it develops its analysis through historical materials, accepting, indeed insisting upon, ambiguity and paradox. The writing is clear, cogent, and compelling. The book is exemplary as history and theory, with great relevance and in sight for contemporary discussions of family policy.
Littleton-Griswold Prize
Mark Tushnet, University of Southern California Law Center, for The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Mark Tushnet’s book is a superb historical investigation into a topic over flowing with importance for all Americans. Tushnet’s gifts for both legal and historical analysis enabled him to exploit a wide variety of primary source materials and produce an innovative study of a vital part of the civil rights movement. This book is rich testimony to the author’s creative thought and deep understanding of American legal history.
Howard R. Marraro Prize
Christopher J. Wickham, University of Birmingham, for The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan Appennines in the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). The selection committee was impressed with the range of sources utilized, the consistently high quality of the writing, the balance and depth of the analysis, and the originality of the conclusions reached. Dr. Wickham’s book effectively employs an anthropological, interdisciplinary approach to meet and solve the many problems inherent in writing a multi-century social history of an area lacking continuous documentation. The author has been able to follow structures and patterns over time with precision and to move easily between institutional, social, economic, and agricultural history. The Mountains and the City is a masterful illustration of how “local history” can be used to explore broad issues of historical importance.
The annual Herbert Baxter Adams Prize in the field of European history and the biennial Paul Birdsall Prize in European military and strategic history were not awarded in 1988.
