We are honored to announce that the 2025 S-USIH Annual Book Prize has been awarded to Keidrick Roy, American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism (Princeton, 2024) and Aziz Rana, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Honorable Mention is awarded to Laura E. Helton, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024). Huzzah and congrats!
We are deeply grateful to the 2025 S-USIH Annual Book Prize committee of Heath Carter, Janine Giordano Drake, and Andrew Klumpp, for their thoughtful work. Here is the committee’s statement on the prize-winning scholarship:
“After a lively discussion, the committee arrived at a tie for best book in intellectual history. The two winners, The Constitutional Bind and American Dark Age, offer two very different ways at looking at the democratic tradition in the United States. We believe that each of these books is an ideal conversation partner for the other, and for that reason we recommend that they are read together.
Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind offers a rich intellectual history of the Constitution as it was discussed and debated within working-class communities from the late nineteenth century to the present. Aziz reminds readers that Americans a century and more ago did not see the Constitution as a historical relic, but as a living document and active interlocutor on the prospect of “democracy.” The book brilliantly historicizes the rise of the contemporary fetish for constitutional “originalism.”
Keidrick Roy’s American Dark Age brilliantly documents the remarkable pervasiveness of a medieval imaginary in the antebellum United States. He goes on to shed fresh light on the rise of Black liberalism, showing how figures like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and more emphasized the feudal nature of chattel slavery in making their case for a more just and equal nation. In addition to offering new historical perspective on this Black liberal tradition Roy makes a case for its ongoing value to the contemporary United States.
As we approach the semiquincentennial and as debates over the very meaning of this country and its history intensify, both books demand to be widely read.”
Of Helton’s work, the committee writes: “Laura E. Helton’s Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History also merits an honorable mention as a superb example of tracing the intellectual and literary histories of the collectors and librarians who built the collections that documented and preserved Black history in the twentieth century. The research is rigorous, the thinking methodologically and theoretically rich, and the prose readable and engaging. Helton has offered a masterclass in tracing this complex and critical histories.”
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