David Sehat's Book Wins Turner Award

Our hearty congratulations go to David Sehat, whose book The Myth of American Religious Freedom has been honored with the 2012 Frederick Jackson Turner Award.

Last spring the USIH blog hosted a roundtable about David's book, with contributions from Daniel K. Williams, Andrew Hartman, Raymond J. Haberski, and Christopher Hickman.

A former blogger for USIH, David currently serves as the Chairman of the S-USIH 2012 Conference Committee.  Please come to New York this November and offer him your congratulations in person.

We are delighted that David's work has been honored with this prestigious award.

And the Winners Are....

Today is Pulitzer Prize announcement day. The big news will no doubt be the decision not to award a prize in fiction for the first time since 1977.

But of greater interest to this blog are three of the awards that were given.

The Pulitzer Prize in Biography went to John Lewis Gaddis's George F. Kennan: An American Life.


The Pulitzer Prize in History went to the late Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which, in an unusual move, was originally nominated for the biography prize and moved over to History by the Pulitzer Board.

And the winner for General Nonfiction was Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Though Greenblatt is of course a literary scholar, this book, on the impact of the 15th-century re-discovery of Lucretius's De rerum natura, is the most intellectual history-oriented of the bunch.

I'm sorry to say that I haven't read any of these three books yet. Each is of some interest to me, though all are rather far removed from anything I'm working on at the moment.

Consider this an open thread to discuss the Pulitzer winners...and any even worthier books from the last year that you feel might have been overlooked.

Andrew is a 3QD Finalist!

Major congratulations to Andrew Hartman!  Last week, five posts from this blog were among the fifty-six nominees for the third annual 3 Quarks Daily Politics and Social Science Prize.  Since we all nominated each other, this was not much of an accomplishment.

Over the weekend, Andrew's post, "'When the Zulus Produce a Tolstoy We Will Read Him': Charles Taylor and the Politics of Recognition," made the list of twenty semi-finalists.  This was nicer...but it was still just a popularity contest among the thousand or so people who dropped by 3QD to vote. 

The cut to nine finalists, however, was made by the 3QD editors, all of whom, as far as I know, are strangers to this blog.  Especially given the many excellent semi-final entries, it's a real honor to make this list...and one that Andrew richly deserves for his terrific post.  At this point, the nine finalists will be sent to Stephen M. Walt (of Walt and Mearsheimer Report fame), who will pick first, second, and third place winners, to be announced "on or around" December 19.  We're all keeping our fingers crossed for Andrew!  In the meantime, do swing by and read his nominated post.  In a year that featured many excellent posts on this blog, it's one of the very best!

CHARLES SCHMITT PRIZE 2012

As the result of generous donations from an anonymous donor and our publisher (Routledge), the International Society for Intellectual History is offering, on an annual basis, a prize to honour the contribution of the late Charles Schmitt to intellectual history. The prize is £250, plus £50 worth of Routledge books, and a year’s free membership of the ISIH with a subscription to the Society’s quarterly journal Intellectual History Review. The paper awarded the prize will also be published in the Intellectual History Review.

Submissions will be accepted in any area of intellectual history, broadly construed, 1500 to the present, including the historiography of intellectual history. Because it is a condition of the award that the paper awarded the prize will be published by IHR, submissions should not have been accepted for publication elsewhere, or exceed 9000 words. Eligibility is restricted to doctoral students and those who have submitted their PhD within two years of the closing date for the prize.

The paper should be forwarded as an e-mail attachment to stephen.gaukroger@arts.usyd.edu.au and to s.clucas@bbk.ac.uk. The e-mail itself should state that the paper is being entered for the prize, and should confirm eligibility at the time of submission, as well as availability of the paper for publication. The closing date for the prize is 31 December 2011, and an announcement of
the award will be made in early 2011.