Announcement: S-USIH 2024 Annual Book Prize

We are honored to announce that the 2024 S-USIH Annual Book Prize has been awarded to Leslie Butler, Consistent Democracy: The “Woman Question” and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2023). Honorable Mention is awarded to Barbara D. Savage, Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (Yale University Press, 2023). Huzzah and congrats!

We are deeply grateful to the 2024 S-USIH Annual Book Prize committee of Shelby M. Balik, Ajay K. Mehrotra, and Josh Shepperd for their diligent work. Here is the committee’s statement on the prize-winning scholarship:

“We are excited to announce that the recipient of the 2024 S-USIH Annual Book Prize is Leslie Butler for her book, Consistent Democracy: The “Woman Question” and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America. From a deep pool of many excellent books, the committee selected Butler’s Consistent Democracy because of its compelling and persuasive arguments, its creative use of a variety of primary sources, and its timely contribution to current debates about the meaning of democracy in principle and in practice.

Consistent Democracy recasts conventional narratives about the paradoxes of nineteenth-century American democracy. It does so by demonstrating how debates over the “woman question” forced theorists, activists, and everyday citizens to rethink the meaning of self-governance, universal suffrage, and the country’s commitments to its fundamental political ideals.

Relying on a vast array of sources that Butler refers to as “published opinion,” the book illustrates how the nineteenth-century battle for gender and racial equality was entwined with broader discussions about the meaning and operation of a liberal democracy.  Butler’s narrative moves seamlessly from high-level political treatises and editorials to the vernacular texts of sermons, domestic advice manuals, and popular fiction.  In the process, it places women’s intellectual contributions at the core of evolving understandings of democracy and self-government.

Among its many contributions, Consistent Democracy moves beyond standard stories about the movement for universal suffrage to explore the multifaceted aspects of everyday democratic self-governance.  From women’s property rights to the role of women in public life, the book uncovers the many ways that nineteenth-century thinkers, reformers, and activists demanded that American become a consistent democracy.

This year the committee also selected an honorable mention awardee: Barbara D. Savage for her book, Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar.  In this fascinating intellectual biography, Savage recovers the life and times of the prolific, yet overlooked, Howard University scholar of international relations and diplomatic history, Merze Tate. Educated at Oxford and Harvard, Tate traveled the world researching, writing, and teaching about what Savage calls “anti-racist geopolitics.”  With her five path-breaking books and dozens of articles, Tate documented how racism shaped nearly every aspect of global capitalism and U.S. and European imperialism.

Savage retraces Tate’s many international travels with archival sources from three different continents.  In the process, Savage provides an inspiring story about how Tate overcame numerous professional and personal obstacles to become a pioneering scholar, teacher, and public intellectual.  The book, moreover, uses Tate’s life as a window into the struggles of a generation of Black and women scholars raised during Jim Crow who contributed to the civil rights movement and helped usher in a new era of racial and gender equality.”