Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

On Zion's Mount wins Parkman Prize

On the heels of the news that Thomas Andrews's Killing for Coal has won a Bancroft Prize comes word that another book in Western History published by HUP has won a prestigious award. Jared Farmer has been honored with the Francis Parkman Prize by The Society of American Historians for his 2008 book On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, which details how Mormon settlers in Utah endowed their new homeland with a spiritual geography -- how they made themselves "native" in a strange land -- and how their effort to confer meaning on their new dwelling place came at the expense of the Utes they displaced, people whom, ironically enough, they considered their "spiritual kin." Farmer, Assistant Professor of History at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, shows how this pattern, this imbuing of the American landscape with "Indian" lore that hadn't existed until Euro-American settlers showed up, was repeated time and time again across the United States, and how the legacy of these cultural acts remains with us today. It's a magnificent book; we're glad the committee shares our enthusiasm and most of all, congrats to Professor Farmer on being recognized in this way.

||| More on On Zion's Mount, including blurbs, reviews, excerpt and index.

Killing for Coal wins Bancroft Prize

Great news -- Thomas Andrews, the author of Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, has been awarded a Bancroft prize, three of which are awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University. From the press release that went out earlier today:

One of the most coveted honors in the field of history, the Bancroft is awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University to the authors of books of exceptional merit in the fields of American history, biography and diplomacy. The 2009 awards are for books published in 2008.

Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley will present the awards at a formal dinner next month at the university’s Low Memorial Library, hosted by the department of history and University Libraries. The Bancroft Prize, which includes an award of $10,000 to each author, is administered by James Neal, vice president for information services and University Librarian.

“Over 200 books were nominated for consideration by the Bancroft jury this year,” said Neal. “Once again, we were very impressed by the number of excellent submissions covering a broad range of themes, and are proud to honor this year’s winners. The Bancroft prize is a celebration and affirmation of historical scholarship, the library, the book, the academic press, and the reportedly threatened scholarly monograph.”

Big-time congratulations to Professor Andrews on winning this prestigious award. Killing for Coal is indeed fantastic; for a little more on the book and the Ludlow Massacre it details, see Caleb Crain's New Yorker review of January 19.

Los Angeles Times Book Prize -- Freeberg a finalist

Congratulations to Ernest Freeberg, whose Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent has been selected as one of five finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography. Freeberg, a historian at the University of Tennessee, is also the author of The Education of Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language.

Glowing green

... not with envy, but with GFP, or green fluorescent protein, discovered in the early 1960s by three scientists studying jellyfish off the west coast of North America. Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien have now been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of and subsequent research into the remarkable sustance known as GFP, which turned out to have all kinds of uses beyond making jellyfish light up (did you know, however, that the last German submarine destroyed during World War I had its position betrayed by bioluminescent plankton?). Once harnessed, GFP turned out to be one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the twentieth century -- after figuring out how to attach it to a protein, researchers could then follow the glow of the GFP to determine when that protein was made and where it traveled. It's fair to say that GFP revolutionized our understanding of molecular biology, transforming our study of everything from the AIDS virus to the workings of the brain.

The story of this remarkable discovery and of the scientists who produced it is told with aplomb in Vincent Pieribone and David F. Gruber's Aglow in the Dark: The Revolutionary Science of Biofluorescence, out in paperback from HUP. Aglow in the Dark is popular science at its best, traversing the continents and the decades to explain the the sheer wonder of bioluminescence and its near-miraculous applications in the life sciences.

More facts about GREEN (from the Sensational Color website, chock full of color facts):

• Green occupies more space in the spectrum visible to the human eye than most colors.
• Green is second only to blue as a favorite color.
• In several religions, green is the color associated with resurrection and regeneration.
• Green was the favorite color of George Washington, the first President of the United States.

GREEN quote of the day:

• "Absolute green is the most restful color, lacking any undertone of joy, grief, or passion. On exhausted men this restfulness has a beneficial effect, but after a time it becomes tedious." -- Wassily Kandinsky

||| Learn more about Aglow in the Dark.

Nerve fibers from neurons that contain the gene for yellow fluorescent protein.

The young and the restless

Youth is disagreeable time, for it is neither possible then nor prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Actually, Friedrich Nietzsche, Randall Stephens is proving you wrong, since he's been selected as one of America's "Top Young Historians" by History News Network. Stephens, the author of The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South--"the most fluent and authoritative synthesis of a complex and controversial subject," says The Atlantic--is also working on a new book for HUP, editing a volume for University of South Carolina Press, one for Columbia University Press, while juggling a couple more book ideas and a teaching schedule. Stephens, a native of Olathe, Kansas, perhaps makes an unlikely historian--the oldest thing he can remember in his hometown is "a Baskin Robbins on the main drag that was built in the mid-1970s."

Latour is a winner...

...in so many ways, but in particular, the author of Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, The Pasteurization of France, We Have Never Been Modern, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, and Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (busy, no?) is most recent recipient of the Siegfried Unseld Preis, awarded by the Hauptverband des Österreichischen Buchhandels.

From their website:

Wie der Suhrkamp Verlag vermeldet, erhält der französische Soziologe, Philosoph und Kulturanthropologe Bruno Latour den mit 50.000 Euro dotierten Siegfried Unseld Preis der Siegfried Unseld Stiftung.

Can you read that? Even if the answer is "nein" (ouch--anyone know the German word for "failed blog joke"?), hearty congratulations are surely in order for Dr Latour, whose excellent work has been no secret around here for a long time.

Millett to receive Lifetime Achievement Award

Congratulations to Alan R. Millett, who has just been selected to receive the 2008 Pritzker Military  Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, which "recognizes a living author for a body of work that has profoundly enriched the public understanding of American military history." Millett is the author, with Williamson Murray, of A War To Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, the best single-volume history of military operations during the Second World War, a book that truly deserves to be called a tour-de-force. Congratulations to Professor Millett and to the Pritzker Library for choosing to recognize his accomplishments.

And the winner is...

Congratulations to Charles Taylor, whose 2007 book A Secular Age has won Christianity Today's Book Award for History/Biography.

HUP honored with "oddest book title" nod

When we wrote about this contest last year, never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that we would be honored with a nomination the very next year!! Hopes are high for an HUP win in the "oddest book title of the year" contest run each year by British publishing magazine The Bookseller, although Jasper McCutcheon's I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen has a few of us worried about our chances. We're nominated for Catharine MacKinnon's latest essay collection, titled Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues. Maybe it's a little early to order the champagne, but one can always browse.

Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that Are Women Human? is of course a serious book dealing with serious issues--a critique of the transnational status quo that also envisions the transforming possibilities of human rights for women across the globe.

Greil Marcus is a knight

Well he is now, at least. Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, The Dustbin of History, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession, and In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992, among others, was made Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Government in order to honor his extraordinary contributions to arts and literature.

The award was presented at a ceremony in San Francisco at which Pierre-François Mourier, the French Consul General, spoke at length about Lipstick Traces and its reception in France, where it maintains a well-deserved place as a benchmark of cultural scholarship. According to a press release from the French Consulate:

The publication in France of “Lipstick Traces” by Allia Publisher, in 1998, had a huge impact on French readers and was highly celebrated in the press. The book, an investigation on rebellion in the XXth century, is one of the best and most precise studies of intellectual and artistic movements in France during this century: from the Dada to the Lettristes, from Isidore Isou to Guy Debord.

Lipstick Traces is currently available in a good-looking paperback edition, but the exciting news is that HUP will be publishing a special 20th-anniversary edition of the book in Fall 2009, timed to coincide with the appearance of the long-awaited and mammoth A New Literary History of America, co-edited by Marcus and Werner Sollors.