SAH Announces Three Book Prize Winners

The Society of American Historians (SAH) has announced the winners of three prizes honoring historical work of exceptional literary merit. SAH encourages and promotes literary distinction in the writing and presentation of American history.

The third annual Tony Horwitz Prize honoring distinguished work in American history of wide appeal and enduring public significance has been awarded to Eric Foner. Foner is the author of such nonfiction books as Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (Oxford University Press); Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (HarperPerennial); The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (Norton); and The Second Founding (Norton).

The 65th annual Francis Parkman Prize honoring literary merit in the writing of history has gone to to Nicole Eustace for her book Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America (Liveright). Eustace is also the author of 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (University of Pennsylvania Press) and Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (UNC Press).

The 62nd annual Allan Nevins Prize for the best-written doctoral dissertation on a significant subject in American history has been awarded to Bench Ansfield for their dissertation, “Born in Flames: Arson, Racial Capitalism, and the Reinsuring of the Bronx in the Late Twentieth Century” (Yale University).