For information on the 2007 awards, click here · Past Prize Winners 2006 Awards KENNETH JACKSON AWARD FOR BEST BOOK (NORTH AMERICAN) PUBLISHED IN 2006  Timothy Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket’s Tale: the Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (W.W. Norton, 2006). Selected from more than thirty outstanding nominations, A Pickpocket’s Tale combines evocative prose with meticulous research to tell the riveting story of a petty criminal named George Appo, and through his story, to convey a revealing history of the underside of the nation’s largest city. Well known in his time, Appo was lost to history until Gilfoyle resurrected him. Gilfoyle’s genius, however, lies in his decision to build the narrative around Appo’s journey. Following Appo through his triumphs and travails allows Gilfoyle to introduce the readers to the Five Points and Chinatown neighborhoods where the pickpocket grew up with other lost boys, learning the code of conmen and petty thieves who relied on guile and intelligence to craft their crimes. Gilfoyle takes us inside prisoner ships, penitentiaries, and asylums to unmask the brutality of the nineteenth-century penal system. In discussing, the violence that Appo encountered and survived, including shootings and stabbings, Gilfoyle demonstrates how a rapidly growing New York City became an increasingly more diverse, more chaotic, and less egalitarian place. The city responded to the perceived urban decay with an expanded municipal bureaucracy: more police, more courts, and more prisons.  Gilfoyle takes time to carefully analyze the institutions and characters we meet along the way. Indeed, the strength of the book is found in its many tangents. They are not meaningless side trips. Rather these tangents form a complex and meaningful web mirroring the interrelated (yin and yang) worlds that defined nineteenth-century New York City - the often hidden criminal community engaged in illicit business and the supposedly law-abiding society that controlled the new economy. A masterful work of urban scholarship, A Pickpocket’s Tale reminds us that good history explains the past, but great history gives the past meaning and illuminates the human condition. BEST BOOK (NON-NORTH AMERICAN) PUBLISHED IN 2005-2006 (Co-Winners): Michael Marme, Suzhou: Where the Goods of All the Provinces Converge (Stanford, 2005). Peter J. Carroll, Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895-1937 (Stanford, 2006).  Scholars of modern Suzhou and other Chinese cities need to be aware of two key periods of transformation in that city's history. First, the emergence during the Ming Dynasty of the city as a marketplace 'where the goods of all the provinces converge', and second the city’s reconstruction as a Treaty Port from 1895 to 1937. These two periods are the subject of books by Michael Marme and Peter J. Carroll that combine high standards of writing with effective use of Chinese archival sources. In Suzhou: Where the Goods of All the Provinces Converge, Michael Marme shows how Suzhou became a hub of regional and national commerce. Exploring a rich variety of primary sources, Marme produces a nuanced local history of Suzhou’s development during a two-hundred year sweep of the city’s history. Impressive in breadth and depth, Marme’s Suzhou provides a foundation for understanding the city’s and region’s urban development, contributes to our understanding of the historical forces shaping China, and offers broader comparative insights into international trends in urban development. In Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895-1937, Peter Carroll explores how understandings of tradition and modernity shaped the development of Suzhou. Informed by theory, meticulous in its use of primary materials, and eloquently written, Reconstructing Suzhou revels in the contradictions of the city’s development. Carroll shows how Suzhou emerged from the interplay of urban structure, architecture, planning, politics, economic development, and preservation. Ultimately, this study reveals much about the China’s national history in the twentieth century and about the broader social and cultural forces shaping cities across the globe.   Individually, each book represents a significant accomplishment.  If read together, these books constitute a substantial body of scholarship on one of the world's most important and hitherto under-researched cities. Both are of exception academic merit and the prize committee urges researchers to read the books in sequence, rather than in isolation. BEST ARTICLE IN SCHOLARLY JOURNAL WITHOUT GEOGRAPHIC RESTRICTION PUBLISHED IN 2006 Coll Thrush, “City of the Changer: Indigenous People and the Transformation of Seattle’s Watersheds,” Pacific Historical Review v. 75, n. 1 (2006), 89-117. In this beautifully written article, Thrush draws together urban, environmental and Native American history in an effort to write indigenous people back into the history of Seattle.  Thrush directly confronts the erroneous mythology that holds Indians and cities in two separate narratives about the American West.  As Thrush convincingly argues, “urban development and the conquest of the continent’s indigenous peoples are, in fact, two elements of the same story.”  Using a wealth of source material, Thrush describes Seattle’s changing urban landscape, where indigenous people continued to live traditional lives into the 1930s.  In his analysis of Seattle’s long and complicated relationship with its waterways, Thrush reveals how efforts to modernize the landscape – especially through the widening and straightening of rivers – led to considerable environmental destruction and the dispossession of indigenous landscapes.  As Thrush writes, the great engineering works of the turn of the twentieth century did not mean “the end of Indian Seattle, but the Progressive Era did mark the end of indigenous Seattle,” as subsistence patterns and connections to traditional places disappeared.  In the end, Thrush points to the irony of Seattle fashioning “an eco-friendly civic identity” and even claiming Chief Seeathl’s environmental ethos as its own guiding philosophy.             In sum, this powerfully argued and elegantly written article is certain to make historians rethink the place of Native Americans in cities throughout North America.  BEST DISSERTATION WITHOUT GEOGRAPHIC RESTRICTION COMPLETED IN 2006 Emily Gunzburger Makas, “Representing Competing Identities: Building and Rebuilding in Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina,” (2006, Cornell University). “Representing Competing Identities” is a detailed, meticulously researched study of how the emergence, evolution, and strengthening of competing national identities has affected the image of Mostar.  It also examines how Bosnia’s conflict has been represented consciously and unconsciously in the city through the rebuilding of destroyed heritage, new construction, and the erection of memorials.  This theoretically sophisticated study engages architectural history, planning history, political history, and cultural history to investigate collective memory and contests over urban identity.  Makas’s work provides us with an exemplary model of urban scholarship, one that compels us to acknowledge the modern city’s complexity and myriad manifestations.