Finalists for 27th Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize
Check out the 5 books selected as finalists for the prize
Announcing the finalists for the 27th Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize
Faith Family and Flag: Branson Entertainment & the Idea of America
(The University of Chicago Press)
Joanna Dee Das
From the shortlisting committee—
Joanna Dee Das’s Faith, Family, and Flag turns Branson, Missouri, from a seemingly marginal entertainment town into a major archive of American political feeling. With vivid prose and original research, Das shows how performance, tourism, religion, patriotism, and free enterprise made modern conservatism feel intimate, joyful, and commonsensical. It is public humanities at its best: serious, accessible, and unexpectedly illuminating.
Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade
(Yale University Press)
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
From the shortlisting committee—
Jim is a timely book that invites readers to re-examine one of the most famous Black characters in American literature through a critical lens that questions who Jim was, why Twain created the character, and the way Jim shaped the world's understanding of race in the United States. As one of the committee members noted, the lessons within Jim are essential to our collective past and present.
Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums
(The University of Chicago Press)
Dolly Jørgensen
From the shortlisting committee—
What are the ghosts of planetary extinction? In Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums, environmental historian Dolly Jørgensen takes us on a long journey across geographies and time to analyze how these extinct animals are displayed in an effort to tell stories to visitors of natural history museums worldwide. Carefully researched and aided by images and illustrations from these museums, the book details the designation, language, histories, and complications of what defines an extinct species. Jørgensen expands her investigation with a firsthand account and voice, crafting a compelling narrative that invites us to reflect about our own humanity in the face of the lost species of our planet.
Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation
(Harvard University Press)
Marla A. Ramírez
From the shortlisting committee—
Marla A. Ramírez’s Banished Citizens recovers the largely forgotten history of an early twentieth-century campaign to remove from the United States people and families connected to Mexican migration, including many U.S. citizens. Drawing on years of oral history interviews and archival research, Ramírez restores voices that might otherwise have been lost while tracing the lasting consequences of these removals. The committee was especially struck by the book’s power to illuminate the present through the past. As one committee member observed, “This was the only book [of the group] where, after reading it, I genuinely felt like I better understood the present through the lens of the past.”
Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are
(University Press of Kansas)
Mary E. Stuckey
From the shortlisting committee—
This book is accessible and readable, making weighty intellectual concepts like communal memory and political rhetoric legible and engaging for scholars and general audiences alike. Not another biography, it is instead a sophisticated and nuanced rhetorical analysis of how Jefferson the man and his writings have been used; it begins with an exploration of how other presidents have used his image, then turns to other sites of national identity creation, including public monuments, popular culture, and children’s literature. Most significantly, the study encourages us to think critically not only about how we think about the past we think we know but also how and why we imagine ourselves as “American.”