U.S. Intellectual History Blog

S-USIH Book Prize Award Announcement

We are pleased to announce that the 2021 S-USIH Annual Book Prize has been awarded to Andrew Jewett for Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2020).

Award winners receive a $250.00 prize and their work is recognized at the upcoming S-USIH annual conference. The 2021 S-USIH Book Award is given for the best academic book in U.S. intellectual history published in English in the period between Jan. 1, 2020 and Dec. 31, 2020. The annual prize was first presented in 2013. You can read about past prize winners and their scholarship in our Spotlight/Insight interview series. And! Please stay tuned for our #USIH2021 conference program lineup, coming soon, featuring a special roundtable on this work.

We thank the members of the 2021 S-USIH Annual Book Award committee: Benjamin E. Park (chair), Lilian Calles Barger, and Alexandra Hui. Here is the committee’s statement:

“In an era where a growing number of Americans distrust established and elite authorities of knowledge, Andrew Jewett’s Science Under Fire demonstrates how the country reached this point. This book is an expansive and sophisticated survey of a century of arguments, spanning a number of disciplines and methodologies, that provides an ideological genealogy for some of the current era’s most pressing issues. Historians of America’s intellectual and anti-intellectual traditions will be revisiting this instant-classic for some time.”