A sweeping history of 19th-century westward expansion and an unflinching study of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and the wars in Southeast Asia have won this year’s Bancroft Prize, considered one of the most prestigious honors in the field of American history.
Elliott West’s “Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion” was described by the jury as “a searing narrative explaining how the republic became a transcontinental nation,” through a “vast racial, social and political reordering” that redefined citizenship and the relationship between government, industry and the people.
West, a retired professor at the University of Arkansas, is the author of numerous highly regarded books about the American West. Writing in the magazine True West, Stuart Rosebrook called the book, published by the University of Nebraska Press and weighing in at more than 700 pages, “truly a magnum opus,” written with “depth, detail and literary style.”
Particularly potent, Rosebrook wrote, is West’s presentation of his influential “Greater Reconstruction thesis.” That analysis argues that the reintegration of the South after the Civil War and the push for westward expansion, culminating in the war against Native Americans, were deeply intertwined.
“A satisfying narrative of those crucial years,” West has written, “is possible only when we see North, South and West in play together in reconstructing the nation.”
The second winner, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg’s “Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger and the Wars in Southeast Asia,” was hailed by the prize jury as “a sweeping, panoramic and ultimately damning portrait” of Nixon and Kissinger, which also explores “the human costs of this conflict for the peoples of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.”
The book — more than 600 pages and published by Oxford University Press — draws on voluminous declassified documents that have become available over the past two decades, including more than 20,000 pages of transcripts of Kissinger’s telephone calls.
In an interview last year with The Progressive Magazine, Eisenberg, a professor at Hofstra University, said she had originally planned a much shorter, more narrowly focused book. But going through the new material, she had been surprised by “the extent to which both Nixon and Kissinger’s diplomacy with the Soviets and Chinese was shaped by their need for help and cover” as they desperately sought to extract the United States from Vietnam.
The prize, which comes with $10,000 per winner, was created in 1948 by the trustees of Columbia University, with a bequest from the historian Frederic Bancroft. Submissions (228 this year) are evaluated for “the scope, significance, depth of research and richness of interpretation,” according to a news release.
