Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book in North American Urban History, 2010

Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (UNC Press, 2010)

    Monica Perales’ new book Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community, (UNC Press, 2010) is an extraordinary study of a city that once epitomized industrial might, labor exploitation, and human resilience in the face of both, that today lives on only in memory. This space, only two miles outside of El Paso, TX was born as a company town—a place where the Kansas City Consolidated Smelting and Refining Company, later called the American Smelting and Refining Company or ASARCO, made its fortunes—but eventually became a vibrant community separate and apart from the desires and demands of its main employer. Indeed Smeltertown, once the largest city on the U.S./Mexican border, brought together countless Mexican workers, and created a complex and vibrant community that would, from the 1890s until the 1970s, define the urban landscape of the Southwest over the long 20^th century in ways that scholars have not yet appreciated fully.

From their worn kitchen tables, to their front porches, to their small gardens, to their Catholic Church, the residents of Smeltertown worked hard to create community in the face of horrendous working conditions and the ever present pollution billowing from the smokestacks nearby. Their successes at doing this, and the multi-layered experiences that they had as laborers and city residents, forces us to think about the urban history of the 20^th century in altogether new ways. Not only does Monica Perales place their story, the story of thousands of Mexicans, at the center of 20^th century U.S. urban history, but she also asks scholars to consider far more seriously than they yet do how closely linked the worlds of work and those of city and community building were for the majority of those who lived in, and built, this nation.

Eventually Smeltertown faded from the landscape of the Southwest, but thanks to historian Monica Perales, and her gift for oral history and for the recovery of collective memory, urban historians now have much to mull over, and much to reconsider, about cities are defined and understood in the long 20^th century.

Honorable Mention Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book in North American Urban History, 2010 

Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Harvard University Press, 2010)

Michael Rawson’s book, Eden on the Charles, is a beautifully written study of how a 19^th century city came to be. Telling a complicated story of the social, economic, political, legal, and cultural forces at work that made urbanization possible in this, originally, untamed region of the country is nothing short of fascinating. From Rawson we come to understand that the very basics of urban living, from providing food and clean water to an increasingly concentrated urban population, to making waterways hospitable to major commerce, to attempting to shape natural spaces so that they could be more easily traversed and more formally appreciated, all resulted from a complex negotiation between people and nature as well as between groups of people who had very different visions of what a city should be. 

     The way that Michael Rawson recaptures the various struggles that early Bostonians waged as they tried to built the “City on the Hill,” and the processes that they went through as they, many times, were forced to adapt to the realities of the natural environment, all give urban historians much to mull over about cities across the country in this period. Thanks to Rawson’s rich study of Boston, scholars of all cities must now consider the interplay of people and nature, and the contradictory desires that different groups of people brought to the table when they faced the challenges of the natural environment while also seeking to build a major metropolis.

 Best Book (Non-North American), 2009-2010

Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010). 

The award for the Best Book – Non-North American goes to Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010).  Broad and ambitious in scope, this eclectic and beautifully written book explores Sydney’s early history from a range of perspectives. The structure of the narrative is especially elegant, beginning with the view from the colonial center and moving out through convicts, women, and aboriginal people, always remembering that the landscape itself shaped the city and the lives lived out in it. Drawing on her own expertise in archaeology, and that anthropologists, geographers and historians, Karskens provides an account of the integration of and conflict between European and indigenous people that is balanced and evocative.

 Best Article Award, 2010

Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History” The Journal of American History 97, (Dec. 2010):

The committee agrees that the clear winner of the competition is Heather Ann Thompson’s article, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History” The Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (Dec. 2010).

This is an article of lasting significance that makes a powerful intervention into the scholarship on postwar cities. There has been a spate of recent scholarship on the explosive growth of prison systems in the postwar United States, but most of this work has focused on either the prison systems themselves or the public policy debates that shaped their growth. Thompson’s contribution is to show that mass incarceration should be considered among the major influences producing the “urban crisis.” The imprisonment of unprecedented numbers of young men (particularly young black men) contributed directly to impoverishing urban neighborhoods, undermining the labor movement, sapping the political power of central cities, and weakening postwar liberalism. Thus, mass incarceration should be considered not simply as a reflection of rising criminality, nor even as a symptom of so-called “urban decline,” but as a factor in urban history comparable in significance to those already explored by scholars of deindustrialization, suburbanization, white flight, and conservative ideology.
The article detects the roots of mass incarceration in the pre-Civil Rights era, when criminologists and ordinary white Americans ascribed deviant tendencies to nonwhites. As blacks made stronger claims to equal citizenship in the last third of the twentieth century, white public officials drew on this racialist tradition in their increasingly aggressive attempts to impose “law and order.” The adoption of harsh new drug laws produced (or at least exaggerated) an artificial spike in crime rates, which in turn was used to justify a growing police presence in schools, streets and other public spaces in black neighborhoods. Incarceration disrupted urban family structures and had lasting effects on family incomes; released convicts suffered long-term health consequences and had difficulty finding jobs. Meanwhile, the use of prison labor by private employers diminished the demand for free-world labor and put downward pressure on free-world wages. Though the construction and operation of prisons did create new jobs, a disproportionate number of these jobs were in remote rural areas. Rural white areas also benefitted politically from mass incarceration; the non-voting prison population was counted as part of the population of the surrounding rural district for purposes of representation and distribution of government resources.

            Given its broad scope, the article inevitably rests on a wide range of sources, some more persuasive than others. Some readers may question, for instance, the extent to which incarceration shaped labor markets on a national level. Nonetheless, one of the markers of innovative scholarship is that it encourages other researchers to explore, evaluate, challenge or confirm its findings. Thompson’s article opens fruitful lines of inquiry for future scholarship. Thus, in the judgment of the committee, this provocative essay is likely to influence urban research for years to come.

 Best Dissertation Award, 2010

Alexia Yates, “Selling Paris: The Real Estate Market and Commercial Culture In The Fin-De-Siecle Capital,” (Yale University, 2010).

      Alexia Yates’ dissertation, “Selling Paris: The Real Estate Market and Commercial Culture In The Fin-De-Siecle Capital,” has been awarded the 2010 dissertation prize by the Urban History Association. In this work, Yates argues that “tracing the activities of a host of commercial actors, ranging from land developers, real estate agents, and building managers to investors in joint stock companies, property owners, and renters, reveals the existence of a French culture of commerce centered on speculation and risk-taking.” This meticulously researched work impressed the committee with the sheer scope of the sources Yates’ consulted. Her sources included company share holder reports, municipal tax evaluations, and construction permit dossiers, and a variety of advertisements for Parisian properties. The selection committee noted the importance of Yates’ argument not only for the way it sheds light on the history of Paris at the turn of the century, but for the way in which Yates’ scholarship potentially may inspire other scholars to consider the relationship between the evolution of the commercial real estate market and the history of cities in general. The work models a blending of business history and urban history into a cohesive whole. Through Yates’ work, we see how Parisian business culture reshaped the understanding of the built environment and how the city’s citizens grew to understand their dwellings as commercial investments rather than forms of shelter. In a modern setting, where the HGTV shows “Selling New York” and “Selling L.A.” now pass as popular entertainment, we may assume that the packaging of urban housing as an object of investment and speculation was an inevitable or simple process. Through her rigorous research, Yates persuasively demonstrates the complexity of the transformation of urban spaces into commodities.