Award Category: History

“Mr. Sontag has managed somehow to do the impossible, present a coherent and significant interpretation of the extraordinary period from 1919 to 1939.” – Robert F. Byrnes

This is a masterful effort to recognize and place the prison and asylums in their social contexts. Rothman shows that the complexity of their history can be unraveled and usefully interpreted. By identifying the salient influences that converged in the tumultuous 1820s and 1830s that led to a particular ideology in the development of prisons and asylums, Rothman provides a compelling argument that is historically informed and socially instructive. He weaves a comprehensive story that sets forth and portrays a series of interrelated events, influences, and circumstances that are shown to be connected to the development of prisons and asylums. Rothman demonstrates that meaningful historical interpretation must be based upon not one but a series of historical events and circumstances, their connections and ultimate consequences. Thus, the history of prisons and asylums in the youthful United States is revealed to be complex but not so complex that it cannot be disentangled, described, understood, and applied.

The late Samuel Eliot Morison, former US Navy admiral, was also one of America’s premier historians. Combining a 1st-hand knowledge of the sea & transatlantic travel with a readable narrative style, he produced what has become the definitive account of the great age of European exploration. In his richly illustrated saga, he offers a comprehensive account of all the known voyages by Europeans to the New World from 500 to the 17th century.

Fascinating look behind the scenes at post-WWII Military Intelligence operations to secure the services of the scientists formerly employed by Germany or who had escaped Nazi Germany.

Mr. Jones deals with the dynamic years between the Civil War and the First World War, when America was finding itself as a continent-wide, united nation.

In this refreshing study of the role of women in our society, Elizabeth Janeway uses information from historians, sociologists, psychoanalysts and anthropologists. She finds that the idea of women as household drudges is barely three centuries old and, worse, confined largely to the middle class. She examines why society is so reluctant to abandon this notion, and finds the answer lies in a number of well-established social and psychological patterns.

Carl Degler’s 1971 Pulitzer-Prize-winning study of comparative slavery in Brazil and the United States.

Until Carl Degler’s groundbreaking work, scholars were puzzled by the differing courses of slavery and race relations in the two countries. Brazil never developed a system of rigid segregation, such as appeared in the United States, and blacks in Brazil were able to gain economically and retain far more of their African culture. Rejecting the theory of Giberto Freyre and Frank Tannenbaum—that Brazilian slavery was more humane—Degler instead points to a combination of demographic, economic, and cultural factors as the real reason for the differences.

The well deck forward was littered with ice knocked or scooped from the iceberg. But from the point of view of most of the passengers, contact between the ship and the ice was so slight as to be negligible. “I wound my watch—it was 11:45 P.M.,” one of them recalled, “—and was just about to step into bed, when I seemed to sway slightly. I realized that the ship had veered to port as though she had been gently pushed. If I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled, the shock was so slight.” But, almost as if she had been gutted by a fishhook, the huge starboard hull of the ship was already opened lengthwise. In moments, watertight bulkheads were transformed from bastions of protection against the sea to deadly containers weighted with tons of salt water. —from The Sway of the Grand Saloon, on the Titanic