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News Release
| For immediate use |
April 12, 2005 -- No. 175 |
UNC Press book, finalist for Pulitzer,
recognized with Bancroft, Curti prizes
CHAPEL HILL — University of North Carolina Press author Michael O’Brien has received the coveted Bancroft Prize and is co-winner of the Merle Curti Prize for his recent two-volume study, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860.
O’Brien’s work was also one of only three finalists this year for the Pulitzer Prize for a book on U.S. history.
Columbia University awards the Bancroft Prize annually by for the best American history book.
"In what can only be described as magisterial fashion, O’Brien has chronicled the lives and works of antebellum Southern writers and thinkers—from dissenters like the Grimké sisters to the man Richard Hofstader called the ‘Marx of the Master Class,’ John C. Calhoun, and almost everyone in between," Bancroft jurors wrote.
The Organization of American Historians awards the Merle Curti Prize for the best book in American social, intellectual, and/or cultural history each year.
Conjectures of Order analyzes the lives and works of antebellum Southern thinkers and
reintegrates the South into the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history. It demonstrates the sophistication and complexity of Southern intellectual life before 1860.
Reviews have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the American Scholar, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications.
An Atlantic Monthly writer called Conjectures of Order "Breathtakingly grand . . .. This is a work of lasting significance -- it will . . . alter and widen our conceptions of the antebellum United States and of the currents of American thought."
O’Brien is university lecturer in American history at the University of Cambridge and is a fellow of Jesus College there. He is editor-in-chief of the Southern Texts Society and is author or editor of several books on Southern intellectual history.
"In a time when it is challenging for authors and publishers to produce truly monumental works of scholarship, it is gratifying to have this recognition for this excellent book," said David Perry, UNC Press editor-in-chief. Michael O’Brien has permanently redefined the way we think about the ‘Mind of the South.’"
UNC Press published Conjectures of Order in March 2004. It is available in a two-volume hardcover edition for $95 at bookstores or from the press. Call (800) 848-3829 for toll-free credit card orders, or order online at www.uncpress.unc.edu.
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UNC Press contacts: Gina Mahalek or Amy McDonald, (919) 966-3561
UNC News Services contact: David Williamson, (919) 962-8596