provost and university librarian. good evening. it's. good evening and welcome to the bancroft prize program. columbia university library is co-sponsors. this important event with the columbia department of history as our dedicated historians say, the work of historical scholarship is never finished and we reexamine it through present day lenses. today, especially today, it seems it seems important to lift up that critical work of examining and reexamining history. history is happening right now, and i am grateful for all of the hard labor that goes into researching and writing history, including not only the history in, but also the labor of librarians, archivist sites, curators, editors, and other workers whose critical work, work and support deserves to be acknowledged. a jury is chosen each year by our history to award the prizes to outstanding historians of the americas. one of the leading historians and that department is selected to chair a panel of three jurors representing the finest scholars in the field from excellent research universities across the country. this year, we are especially pleased to expand the winner's circle of prior awardees of the bancroft prize, and we are joined here by a good number of these winners whom you may identify at the reception by their light blue lapel pins. so winners, circle members, please stand up so that we can celebrate you as a group. we're also pleased that c-span's american history tv is continuing its partnership up with us this year by filming tonight's program for airing and archiving on its website. we will circulate word to all invitees to this special event when we have confirmed dates for airing and online access, we are really pleased that so many guests are joining us tonight for the bancroft prize program here at the forum. i want to acknowledge the support out of my colleagues who are here from the office of the provost and the support of executive vice president amy hungerford, who has joined us tonight. thank you, amy, for being here. we also want to especially acknowledge the members of columbia's 1754 society who have elected to remember the university and their estate planning. tonight's ceremony features two distinguished winners this year as well as our dissertation prize winner. and we will learn through insightful discussions between the jurors and the book prize winners about the remarkable eras in our nation's history that their winning publications examine and hear from the authors how they frame the historical lessons that their research illuminates, the importance of the book. the research into both primary and secondary sources conducted by these winning authors and the new understanding that has been created through their quantum machines is what we are here to celebrate. the endowment left to columbia libraries by the visionary frederick bancroft enables us to continue to acquire rare archival material and makes it possible for us to continue supporting scholarly research that's conducted by the by historians from around the world. we had a wonderful prize jury this year, and i'm going to sit and enjoy the program along with all of you and turn things over to them. thank you. please welcome michael witkin, professor of history and chair of the 2024 bancroft prizes jury. i thank you for coming. i want to start off by thinking the columbia university library staff, led by ann thornton, which were fantastic in helping us get through this program or take on this task. we got something like 228 books this year, so it was quite the long list. and the faculty, the staff of the library were instrumental in making sure those books kept coming and to the point where i wish they stop, but, you know, this was also the thing where i remember i wanted to do a profession where i could read a lot and i picked the right lane. i want kind of circle back to what people are about. the introduction and was the bancroft prize and point out isn't just a prize in nonfiction writing this is a history prize shared by historians, professional historians who weren't just thinking about a well written book, but are really thinking about the craft of history. and so really paying attention to the research, paying attention, the craft of exposition, historical writing, argumentation, and, you know, the bancroft is a is a prize that i think historians really relish. and we can take it to the bank that the the books selected for this are the best books in american diplomatic history for that year. and so one of the first things i had to do was pick a jury and i picked two outstanding colleagues, maria montoya and manisha sinha all introduced them quickly. and then we'll turn to the first book for two books, i guess go through both books. maria montoya is the global associate professor of history at new york university. she's a former dean of arts and sciences at nyu. she's also the past president of the western historical association and a fellow at the american antiquarian society. maria earned her b.a., m.a. and ph.d. at yale university, and she's the author of numerous articles on the history of the american west environmental and labor history, latino history and american expansion. her book, translating property. and that's what leon graham in conflict over land in the american west. from 1840 to 1900. he's also the author of or one of the main authors of the history textbook global americans a social global history of the united states. and she's currently working on a book about the workplace of their own progressive management of workers and their families in colorado's coalfields. we're coming with oxford university press. i also asked manisha sinha to join me on the panel. she is the james earl and shirley draper chair in american history at the university connecticut and president elect of the 2024 society for historians, the early republic, which she was born in india and received her ph.d. from columbia university, where her dissertation was nominated for the the bancroft prize. she's the author of the town of revolution of slavery politics and ideology in antebellum south carolina, which was named one of the best books on slavery and politico and recently featured in the new york times 1619 project. her second book, the slaves cause a history of the evolution of abolition, was longlisted for the national book award in nonfiction and won numerous other awards. and she is currently just finished a book called the rise and fall of the second american republic reconstruction 1968 1820 forthcoming with liveright press in 2024 and i chose to mention that graciously accepted to be on the committee to kind of round out so we could take on this kind of enormous task or i'm a scholar of indigenous and early american history. many, manisha, focus on slavery in the 19th century and the early 20th century. i think focusing on the 19th century and 20th century. so we were able to sort of kind of cover the field with with text coming in and with 228 selections. it was it was quite a task. but the text that we had, the books were looking at, like i said, were some of the best in history. it was a difficult decision making process. the both the books that we selected take on the subject of american power and the idea and also the idea of america in the world. i think is a way of thinking about it with continental reckoning, elliott west explores this of explosive growth of the republic, you know, leaving behind the revolutionary era and entering into the sort of era of expansion. and we can think about this in the sense that in 1840, as americans thinking about the west could still look at ohio and and michigan and wisconsin and in iowa. but beyond that, they were thinking of the great plains as sort of a wasteland. indian country and a place that was sort of not inhabitable. and the thing that sort turned that around is not only the discovery gold, but the mexican-american war, which suddenly opens up the continent to american expansion at a time when the country is dispersing and population and when 1800 the population of the republicans around 5.3 million by 1840, that population has grown to 17 million. and one of the things that professor west chronicles is the expansion of that population surging into the west, a desire for access to the pacific market, the knowledge of transcontinental crossings that come with the discovery of gold and the transfer to the crossing of the great plains, and then also just the sort of sense of racial and social superiority that's fueling this sort of rise of american expansion, the desire to sort of take ownership of the continent becomes a transcontinental nation and. we can see similarly with with fire and rain, which a moment when the sort of american sense of national security entitlement is also at the center of this analysis and analysis of the subject of the nixon administration's handling of the wars in vietnam, laos and cambodia, and really the diplomacy surrounding those war. those wars were nixon and kissinger are essentially desperately seeking the cooperation of the soviet union and china find a face saving exit from the vietnam war and as a consequence sort of reshape american diplomacy in the service of that goal, that self-serving goal. at the same time, however, she goes beyond this, the policy level of analysis to explain how these wars affected the everyday lives of american citizens, paying for the price, the hubris, paying the price for the hubris, and the fraud of the nixon and kissinger administrations and their self-serving diplomacy around the war with that kind of gentle introduction, let me read you the jury statement for elliott west, and then we will introduce the militia in order to come out and have a quick conversation continue. as i mentioned, elliott west tells the epic story, the birth of the united states beginning in the mid-19th century, the stories, the history of america's western expansion, a searing narrative explaining how the republic became a transcontinental nation. this outcome was not inevitable. the country did not grow organically across the western landscape of north america. instead, the united states worked hard using new technology like the telegraph and the railroad to impose the spatial and political order across the trans mississippi west, the republic colonized indigenous nations and obliterated their homelands, refashion their territory into new states that were incorporated into the union along with the resources of the west. gold, copper, petroleum, coal, uranium. exploiting these resources while repopulated in the west resulted in the most expansive environmental transformation in north american history. the united states. in undertaking this transformation, had embarked on a long and often painful process of unification following the violence and chaos of the civil war, expanding rapidly into the west, the nation absorbed spanish and mestizo populations, and the newly acquired southwest asian major chinese immigrants in the west coast as well as a newly emancipated african-american population. in short, in order to integrate the western half of the continent into the republic, the country had to undergo a radical transformation in a vast racial, social and political reordering that redefined the definition of citizenship and redefined the relationships between government, industry and the people who created the modern united states. with that, i'd like to introduce eliot and alicia to come up and discuss continental recommend. thank you, michael, for that introduction, and thank you to the columbia libraries for hosting us today. it's a real pleasure, eliot, to talk to you about your bancroft prize winning book, continental reckoning. i have long admired your work and just to see this, which i think is really your magnum opus right. very ambitious synthesis of 19th century western history. a broad history of that period. that is also beautifully written. so my first question has to do with simply why you chose to write this broader history. the books that i have admired a lot, your previous books like the contested plains and the last indian war, the nez perce war, were mainly indigenous history. so you chose to write that broad order history of the west rather just an history of the west from the indigenous perspective. so i want you to talk a little bit about what motivated you to write this broader synthesis. i mean, i'm thinking as a graduate student reading walter prescott webb's great plains and more recently, richard white's book, which is more of a textbook, how does your synthesis actually differ from that? and what motivated you to write this broader history? well i certainly have been very interested in indigenous native history. more recently, but earliest interests were in different areas. i was fascinated with social history, with history, the family and childhood and community fascinated with environmental history and in other areas sort of jumped around a lot and then picked up a lot of other worlds, of course, to tomorrow will be my 79th birthday tomorrow. so happy birthday. so your well, you know, you accumulate a lot of information over your work catalog. and so i thought to try to bring that together and to try to give it some shape, try to it's a very complex period is also happening all over the place. so but more than that, i think if there's a common concern of historians of my particular cohort and generation, it is to try to encourage and encourage us to bring the american west more centrally the american narrative. so often the past considers kind a peripheral area. but in fact, i think we argue especially the period that i look at the second half of the 19th century, basically it's really an area that is both critical to understanding how the united states moves into this new direction toward modern america in many ways. one of the most illustrative ways to understand that process, to what's going on in a lot of ways to get the best sense of where america was heading, best place to go was montana or someplace out west where i was trying to get that point across as well. and so then you do it beautifully. and what a nice way to celebrate your birthday, right? with the bancroft prize. so just, you know, i i'm a civil war historian, trained one a little bit. and read this book, dissenters the civil war, a little bit more about the transformations in the west as being really important to understanding the growth of the modern american nation state, modern american society. and i was thinking back to turner's four year old frontier thesis. he tried to do the same thing, but you do it rather differently than him. and i. i want you to talk a little bit about that, too. well, for all his, i am a great admirer of turner in many ways, but i sure hope no one would think that i'm arguing that the birth of the west emergency american west those years was somehow more important than some. i'm not sure how you go about overestimating the importance of the civil war. you but the point i'm trying to make is that the civil war is so compelling, the story is so compelling and so dramatic. there's such a narrative, beautiful narrative structure to it, that it tends to out shadow overshadow everything else. that's going on. but in four stories, it's become the sort of this historiographical black hole, you know, that sucks everything into it. and as i said a moment ago, i think we need to remember that things were happening. carter literally lost the title. this is a story of continental importance. and at the same time that those events unfolding in the fifties leading to the civil war, during the war itself, during the aftermath of the civil war, a lot was happening out west. that has its own story, its own narrative, but also was continually sort of in conversation with the east. so to really understand what was happening during what we call the civil war era, we need to look at everything that was happening across and the military history. if if we talk about the military, you know, the victory of the union of the confederacy, the west was a footnote to both, but all kinds of other things were happening during that period. and until we balance step out a little bit more, i think we will still be sort of hindered, blinkered, somewhat to understand what was what was happening. yes. and that is something that i really appreciated about your work as unlike turner, who said, well, you know slavery, civil war may be not that important. you really understood this as a parallel process and you talked about the significance of both these transformative events in, 19th century united states history. so my third question has to do with your very famous thesis, which i think would really in this book, which is this notion of a greater reconstruction, normally think of reconstruction as the period immediately after the civil war. and you argue for this greater reconstruct in looking at events in the west from the mexican war right up to the end of, you know, the attempt to establish an interracial democracy in the south, that that that inform this expanse of land that the united states gets, that that is really something you you argue we must look at and you are, though, quite mindful of the problem of them both as similar processes. as you said in one of your books quote the two missions graded against each other. so one of my favorite lines from this book, western indians or their own category, they had not come to america. america had come to them. so what do you think. this is, i think, one of the most influential ideas in the united states history. now, your notion of a greater stemming from western history. what do you think are the are the pitfalls maybe of that idea, but also some of the the promises in terms of reinterpreting united states history? mm hmm. well, it's basically a fairly simple idea, but it's full of all kinds of cross-cut currents and contradictions, complexities. one of the exam arguments about the great parts degrading against each other. i think some suggest is that the period, if nothing else, from 1850 to 1880, let's say, experienced by far, by far the greatest expansion of the embrace of who was an american, who were to be citizens, bringing so many more people in in terms of numbers, but also so many different beginning, obviously, with emancipation. 4 million people brought into citizenship, but also the acquisition of our wealth brought indian peoples in, hispanic peoples in the southwest, asian peoples into the far coast with the gold rush. what do we do this right? i mean, it posed a real crucial question how does a republic work? how does our form of government work when you have that level of conflict, a level of diversity? well, i don't think basically what i found was the federal government's answer to that was, well, we have to establish this common cultural ground. right. so everybody if everybody holds the same ground that they can all take part in this process. and how do you do that? well, it's going to be a common language. well, it's got to be a a common embrace of their free holding capitalist market economy. it's to be we're going to do it through education of children. so these variety of ways, you know, and what fascinated me was this basically the same approach was taken toward freed people. and native peoples. so we're taking this basically the same approach toward these different groups to try to come up to this answers to this common problem. and when you think of it that way, we're after the same thing, right? in both places, pursuing the same goals. and what do you end up with? you know, slave people or freed indian people or dispossessed and confined or reservations rights are given to some people. rights are taken away from other people. the same purpose, the same overall goal thought this way. eri
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