NEWS

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Press racks up multiple major book publishing awards

CHAPEL HILL -- The University of North Carolina Press’s motto of "publishing excellence" worked out well this academic year as the publisher won multiple top prizes, including a Triple Crown of sorts.

"Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands" by James F. Brooks swept three major history prizes in 2003.

They were the Francis Parkman Prize, presented by the Society of American Historians to "stimulate the writing of history as literature;" the Bancroft Prize, given each year by Columbia University to the most distinguished work in American history; and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, given by the Organization of American Historians to the best first book on a significant aspect of American history.

Brooks, an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in North America, directs the School of American Research Press in Santa Fe. His book examined widespread enslavement of Indians by Spanish colonialists in the American Southwest between 1500 and 1880. The work was published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Va.

"We are absolutely jubilant," said UNC Press director Kate Torrey. "Winning these three prizes is wonderful recognition for Dr. Brooks, for the institute and for the press. It caps an amazing year in which UNC Press books have won a staggering number of the most significant prizes and is a great tribute to our publishing program."

The press’s winning streak began in 2002 when Mary A. Renda, author of "Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940," won three awards. They were:

• the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, awarded every year for the best book published in American Studies;
  
  
• the Stuart L. Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, awarded annually to an author for his or her first book on any aspect of the history of American foreign relations; and
  
  
• the Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association, given for a distinguished book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America or Canada from 1492 to the present.
  

"Taking Haiti" is a cultural history of the first U.S. military occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). Mary A. Renda is associate professor of history and women’s studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass.

Accolades for the Press’s books continued when historian George C. Rable was awarded the Lincoln Prize from Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania for the book "Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!," published in 2002. The Lincoln Prize is given annually to the best book on Lincoln and the Civil War and is considered the pinnacle achievement in this field of study.

Rable offers a detailed history of the Fredericksburg campaign and shows how the horrific carnage, with 13,000 casualties on the Union side and 5,000 Confederate casualties, haunted military and civilian survivors on both sides. George C. Rable is the Charles G. Summersell Professor of Southern History at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

"It is very rare for any publisher, but especially one the size of UNC Press, to win the Bancroft, Parkman, Turner, Beveridge, Lincoln and John Hope Franklin prizes all in the same year and some other important ones too, but we have, and we are delighted," Torrey said.

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UNC Press Contact: Gina Mahalek, (919) 966-3561.
UNC News Services Contact: David Williamson. (919) 962-8596