News & Announcements
November 10, 2021
2021 Annual Meeting Prize, Honors, and Fellowship Winners
The ASLH is delighted to announce our 2021 prize, honors, and fellowship winners!
Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize
Land-Grab Universities (https://www.landgrabu.org/) a remarkable project led by Dr. Robert Lee, Lecturer in American History and Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge University who put together an interdisciplinary team that included a journalist (Tristan Ahtone), a data visualizer (George McGhee), a web designer (Cody Leff), a cartographer (Margaret Peace), and a photographer (Kalen Goodluck). The website’s powerful visualization of expropriated Indigenous land has garnered international attention and spurred historical investigations at many of the 52 universities, such as Cornell University, that were built on and with Indigenous land acquired as a result of The Morrill Act, which President Lincoln signed into law in 1862. The quality of the website, coupled with the project’s commitment to sharing its data and computational programs via a GitHub repository are the distinguishing features of this project, as is its mission to use historical investigation to spur educational change. The project seeks to increase the number of Indigenous students enrolled at the 52 universities that benefitted from this historical process of dispossession. Overall, Land-Grab Universities brilliantly combines original research, computational method, and sophisticated data visualization to make its scholarly and social impact.
Cromwell Article Prize
Gloria McCahon Whiting for “Race, Slavery, and the Problem of Numbers in Early New England: A View from Probate Court,” William and Mary Quarterly, 77, no.3 (2020):405-440.
Gloria McCahon Whiting’s “Race, Slavery, and the Problem of Numbers in Early New England: A View from Probate Court” is a creative, brave, and rigorous exemplar of legal history scholarship. Through an insightful, imaginative analysis of tens of thousands of probate court transactions in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, from 1639 to 1769, Whiting shows how historians can use legal archives to analyze both the structural contours of coercive institutions and the qualitative experiences of the individuals who strove to make lives within them.
Whiting’s use of legal archives makes an important intervention in slavery studies, where recent debates have questioned the reliance on such materials for their potential to repeat the violence that the law once rendered against enslaved persons. Using these archives can affirm the vision of those in power, dehumanizing the enslaved by representing them only through aggregation and abstraction. Whiting, however, shows the utility of these materials. In her hands, aggregation does justice to historical subjects by accurately rendering the systems of power they endured. With careful counting, she upends conventional assumptions about the practice of slavery in colonial New England, demonstrating that enslaved persons of African descent quickly replaced indentured European labor and that Native Americans were never a significant source of bound labor in the region. She also uses the records to reveal qualitative insights into enslaved persons’ efforts to shape their own lives: to form families, make claims on owners and their heirs, hold property, engage in commerce, and seek freedom. Whiting excavates the persuasive talents of a bondsman name Titus who convinced the heirs of a slave owner to draft manumission papers. She writes about a girl in bondage named Rose who learned to read, studied religion, and convinced an owner that his claims to property in her were illegitimate. She traces kin relationships and documents property holdings of enslaved persons. She asks readers to imagine the world map that hung above the bed of an enslaved man named Philip and to consider what he might have imagined and remembered as he gazed at it. This article, modest and measured in tone, is an understated, yet vitally important and courageous piece of scholarship that uses law to understand the dynamics of power and the humanity of the powerless.
Cromwell Book Prize
Christine Walker for Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire (Omohundro and University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and built upon painstaking and wide-ranging archival research across Britain, Jamaica, and the United States, Jamaica Ladies struck the committee as a tour de force. Walker focuses on free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent who inhabited this island in the first century after it came under English rule and offers a complex, multifaceted portrait of their activities as colonizers and slaveholders with the broader aim of exploring “the gendered dimensions of power” in the Anglo-Atlantic world. She examines Jamaica’s first century under English rule, as slavery expanding rapidly across the British Atlantic colonies, and her most compelling insights derive from a seemingly forgotten pile of testamentary devices housed in the Jamaican archives. It may be that Walker has analyzed every will penned by property-holding women in Jamaica during her period of study. The granularity of the lived experiences that Walker carefully pieces together from these terse and fragmentary legal records, as well as from a rich assortment of mercantile and personal correspondence, enables her to make a compelling case that these women were “handmaidens of empire.”
Walker thus challenges the conventional renderings of the British Caribbean as “a hypermasculine space,” and implicates its titular subjects in the building of Britain’s largest and wealthiest slaveholding colony. The activities of these Jamaica Ladies are surveyed in the first three intricately wrought chapters of the book, situated respectively in Port Royal, urban Kingston, and the plantations of the rural parishes. Transported to these colonial spaces, the reader finds free and freed women playing critical roles as proprietors and managers of plantations and businesses as well as households, forging links in imperial commercial networks and structuring everyday life in the colony’s ports and backcountry. In so doing, Walker makes indelibly clear, these propertied women both contributed to and profited from the exploitative extraction, brutal discipline, and deadly violence that marked this slave society.
The complicated interplay between gender, race, sex, and power is even more brilliantly illuminated in a second set of chapters which explore the socio-legal practices of inheritance bequests, nonmarital relationships, and manumission. Following the paper trails left behind by her historical subjects with an acute grasp of the legalities of colonial life, Walker vividly demonstrates the gendered nature of slaveholding – the distinctive dynamics, as well as the intimacies and animosities that developed between female enslavers and the men, women, and children they acquired as property and sometimes incorporated into their own families and wider kinship networks. The accumulated details of these everyday interactions between owners and captives add up to far more than the sum of their parts, persuasively illustrating how women’s possession of other people enhanced their own sovereignty, enabling them to command more wealth and independence than their counterparts in other parts of the British Empire. And yet the relatively autonomous actions of these female slaveholders did not always or only operate to strengthen the institution of slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic world. They also exposed strains and contradictions in the gender and racial hierarchies that were supposed to govern colonial life, strategically “creating loopholes for a select few to escape bondage” that threatened to “collapse the boundaries between enslavement and liberty.” In this way, Walker’s careful analysis of the role of women property holders helps reduce the historiographical division between studies of the West Indies and the rest of British America. Indeed, Walker’s analysis offers a model for rethinking who used law to build the empire, how they did so, and to what ends.
In providing this provocative and persuasive account of the world these female slaveholders helped make, Walker makes a significant contribution to the field of American legal history. Though focused on a British colony that did not become part of the United States, her analysis of how women used wills and their management of property and households and the people in them sheds new light on the roles of law and gender in slaveholding society more generally. Skillfully tacking between legislative codes and surviving wills, inventories, deeds, and other documents that were not originally written for the benefit of historians, Walker exhibits a deep appreciation of what these paper records can and cannot tell us about the society within which they were created. The historical narrative she crafts from these materials is nothing short of revelatory, bringing to light the mixed motives, ideals, and interests that free and freed women brought to the work of building “a brave new world, one that hinged on relentless profit-seeking, coercive colonialism, and profound exploitation.” And because this is a past that is not even past, her book has much to teach us about the dilemmas of our own times.
Cromwell Dissertation Prize
Alyssa G. Penick, for “The Churches of Our Government: Parishes, Property, and Power in the Colonial and Early National Chesapeake,” PhD diss., (University of Michigan, 2020).
In a beautifully rendered and sweeping dissertation, “The Churches of Our Government: Parishes, Property, and Power in the Colonial and Early National Chesapeake,” Alyssa G. Penick tells a revisionist history of disestablishment—how “the legal concept of an establishment of religion evolved from dismantling the established church.” This ambitious dissertation covers a century spanning the late colonial period through the early republic while homing in on specific localities to reveal the myriad ways the Anglican church stood at the center of civic life. Employing an expansive understanding of religious influence, Penick demonstrates the role of statutory and common law in maintaining the church’s powers. Her insightful writing brings alive how the church engaged in everything from policing the public good, to meting out social welfare, to executing law. The manner of disestablishment determined the degree to which it would continue to do so. Disestablishment, Penick insists, was a fundamentally “material process.” Methodologically creative and deeply grounded in archival materials, the dissertation details the church’s substantial wealth, garnered not only through glebes but also through other types of real property, taxation, and enslaved persons. The key to maintaining this wealth, Penick contends, was a common law corporate status: “Vestrymen and church wardens came and went, but parishes existed in perpetuity as corporate entities.” Revolutionaries inverted the meaning of “establishment,” from enforcing orthodoxy, to a new sense of “using state power to protect religious freedom.” That new meaning, in turn, elicited different state-level responses, which Penick brilliantly teases out through a comparison of how Virginia and Maryland, neighbors with distinct patterns of church property-holding, translated the abstract idea of “disestablishment” into concrete legislation with real-world consequences. Disestablishment thus not only changed the structure of the church, it also rearranged the material landscape, loosening church control of white people’s moral conduct while tightening surveillance of the poor and free Black people and changing property relations and social welfare programs. By challenging common individual-rights narratives of religious freedom, this provocative and inventive dissertation gives us a new history of disestablishment but it also provides intellectual grist for our own times.
Sutherland Prize
Priyasha Saksena for “Jousting Over Jurisdiction: Sovereignty and International Law in Late Nineteenth-Century South Asia” Law and History Review 38, no. 2 (May 2020), 409-457.
Priyasha Saksena’s erudite, thoughtful, and well-written article offers a provocative reevaluation of the role international law and especially debates over the nature of sovereignty in controversies over the legal status of princely states in post-1858 colonial India. Tracing competing arguments as they migrated from European treatises on international law to the Political Department of the Government of India as well as the nominally independent states of Baroda and Travancore, Saksena shows how British Indian policymakers adapted pluralist conceptions of divisible sovereign power to support expanding claims over nominally independent South Asian states, while advocates for the princely states responded with equally compelling legal and political arguments that defended their autonomy by privileging an understanding of sovereignty as singular and territorial. In so doing, this article challenges some longstanding and fundamental assumptions about the relationship between modern state sovereignty, discourses of “civilizational” difference, and colonial rule. It also makes a nuanced and powerful case for understanding leaders of princely states—and their legal advocates—not as “collaborators” with British rule but rather as engaged in active if sometimes subtle resistance to it. The article concludes by gesturing to how these conflicts in late nineteenth-century India traveled, serving as precedent for analogous, if distinct, colonial situations across the globe, especially Africa. Thus, in shedding light on the relatively understudied world of late nineteenth century princely states, Saksena presents readers with a compelling argument and method for bringing the exciting and growing fields of South Asian, imperial, and global and international legal histories into a single frame.
Sonia Tycko for “The Legality of Prisoner of War Labour in England, 1648-1655,” Past and Present 246 (Feb 2020), 35-68.
Bringing us back two centuries and across a hemisphere, Sonia Tycko’s meticulously researched and methodically argued article excavates the legal acrobatics that allowed for foreign, especially Dutch and Scottish, soldiers captured by English forces in the mid-seventeenth century to be forced to serve as labor on projects ranging from the drainage of the fens to Caribbean plantations. The Council of State and various private interests saw multiple opportunities in putting prisoners of war to work but were stymied by strictures in the laws of war and jus gentium on the rights of such prisoners, especially prohibitions on enslaving fellow Christians. A bizarrely effective solution was found in reimagining the legal status of such prisoners not as conscripts but rather as akin to convicts and vagrants, offering a precedent for in turn making them an offer they could not refuse to enter into contracts, effectively rendering them legally “free” rather than forced labor. In closely tracking this development, Tycko shows how a population largely consigned to an historiographical footnote in the general story of indentured labor was not only critical to understanding the malleable nature of legal status in the seventeenth-century but also profoundly troubling to our understandings of the critical legal concepts of contract and consent. The article also impressively traces how these arguments developed and were contested among various different actors and interests, offering a creative and original model for linking domestic, international, and Atlantic history—not to mention social, labor, colonial, military, and carceral histories—through the history of legal thought and practice.
Surrency Prize
Kalyani Ramnath for “Intertwined Itineraries: Debt, Decolonization, and International Law in Post-World War II South Asia,” Law and History Review, 38, no. 1 (February 2020), 1-24.
“Intertwined Itineraries” charts a whole world of law in motion. From the courts of Madras to the rice and rubber fields of Southeast Asia, and from there to the law libraries of the Netherlands and India, she traces the travels of a single dispute and its afterlives across several genres of legal writing. She assembles a disparate cast of characters – a Tamil-Speaking Chettiar widow in Madras, a Polish scholar-in-exile, a Dutch scholar of international law in Utrecht – and threads her narrative needle through the most unlikely of places. The result is nothing less than a complete retelling of the histories of decolonization and international law in the Indian Ocean world, and of the many lost streams, disputes, and lives that poured into it. “Intertwined Itineraries” is an ambitious, bold, and breathtakingly creative piece of scholarship.
John Phillip Reid Book Award
Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Entering into a terrain of longstanding scholarly debate, Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross’s Becoming Free, Becoming Back (Cambridge University Press, 2020) traces the winding path from black slavery to black citizenship in Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia. It avoids traditional claims of moral superiority for Latin American systems of bondage. Instead, it shows how in all three societies race became a cornerstone for constructing the normative logic of slavery. With remarkable nuance, their book underscores the ways Iberian legal customs of manumission did make a difference by allowing for the creation of a free black population. Beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and persuasively argued, it impressively deploys cultural history— emphasizing context and contingency—to undermine the seeming historical inevitability of citizenship becoming closely intertwined with whiteness. This is comparative history at its finest.
Peter Gonville Stein Book Award
Nandini Chatterjee for Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords Across Three Indian Empires (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Negotiating Mughal Law is a wonderful combination of philology, imagination, archive sleuthing, and sharp intelligence. Based on a painstakingly collected set of documents in a few languages from a society that lacked a centralized legal archive, it is a micro-history of a family of landlords in central India over several centuries. Chatterjee provides a rich narrative of law as put into practice in the daily lives of a wide range of people. Her attention to methodology is a model of the care and self-criticism that underlies the very best historical research, and for this reason the book is of great value beyond its specific geographical and temporal context.
Honorable Mention:
Samuel Fury Childs Daly for A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Jane Burbank Article Prize
Kalyani Ramnath, for “Intertwined Itineraries: Debt, Decolonization, and International Law in Post-World War II South Asia,” Law and History Review, 38, no. 1 (February 2020), 1-24.
“Intertwined Itineraries” traces a routine case for debt recovery across jurisdictions in South Asia during the upheaval of decolonization and post war independence. In so doing, Ramnath weaves together histories of decolonization, legal pluralism, migration, jurisdiction, and professional legal networks in the making of international law. Beautifully written and well researched, Ramnath shows the reader how numerous and less well known partitions shaped the Indian sub-continent in 20th century South Asian political history.
Honorary Fellows
Shaunnagh Dorsett, Distinguished Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, and Faculty Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington
Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, former Titular Regular Professor of the History of Argentine Law in the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires and Senior Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina
James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School
Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars
Naama Maor for In Search of the “Real Culprits”: The Adult Delinquent in a Progressive Era Juvenile Court
In her elegantly written and deeply researched paper, Naama Maor analyzes previously unexplored cases against adult defendants in the trailblazing Denver Juvenile Court between 1907 and 1927. Maor finds that the court’s reliance on a new, capacious, and ambiguous category of offenses – contributing to the delinquency of a child – facilitated enforcement that both reflected and shaped gendered ideas about age, consent, and criminal liability for the acts of another. In pursuing cases against adults through children, judges, probation officers, and district attorneys invested great power in the hands of the same children the law deemed inculpable due to their age. The paper persuasively shows that in their rush to try these cases, state officials inadvertently gave rise to a potent opposition to the court’s jurisdiction, which challenged the assertion that adults could receive a fair trial in a juvenile court.
Teal Arcadi for Concrete Leviathan: Interstate Highway Litigation and the Clash of Experts and Citizens in Modern America
Teal Arcadi explores how the construction of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways prompted protests and litigation that reformed administrative law and modern American governance from the 1960s onward. His paper explains that when interstate construction began in the late 1950s, it became synonymous with destruction of neighborhoods and parks bulldozed to make way for the “concrete monsters,” as some came to call the interstate highways. “Freeway revolts” erupted in the nation’s cities, with participants demanding altered construction practices that gave citizens and communities more say in the state building process underway. While cultural and urban historians have recounted these uprisings, their legal and governmental impact warrants further treatment, which Arcadi ably provides. Arcadi advances three important and compelling arguments. First, the freeway revolts have a broader governmental history that elucidates the long-simmering and cross-partisan tension between administrative authority and participatory democracy that boiled over after the New Deal. Second, the freeway revolts brought distinctive reforms to the practices of modern American state building, particularly in leading to the canonical Supreme Court case Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe in 1971. Third, despite the reformist inclinations present in Overton Park, the case produced an uneven legal and physical landscape of state building. Ultimately, the paper identifies the emergence of a legal context that prioritized the protection of open spaces at the expense of poor and minority urban communities.
Cromwell Fellowships
Myisha S. Eatmon, Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina for Litigating in Black and White: Black Legal Culture, White Violence, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies.
Benjamin Lyons, who received his PhD from the Department of History at Columbia University, for The Law of Nations & the Conduct of Early American Diplomacy.
Aden Knapp, PhD candidate in History at Harvard University, as well as a visiting scholar at the Lauterpracht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge and a visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen’s iCourts project, for Judging the World: The United States and International Courts, 1898–1971.
Jessica Fletcher, PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University, for Before the Amistad: Cuba, Haiti, and Caribbean Political Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century US Freedom Suits.
Small Grants Award Winners
For the second year, in 2021 the ASLH awarded small grants of $1,000 each to support projects by ten graduate students and early career students.
Jared Berkowitz, PhD candidate, Brandeis University
Du Fei, PhD candidate, Cornell University
Idriss Fofana, JD, Yale, PhD candidate, Columbia University
Luke Haqq, JD, University of Minnesota
Peter Labuza, Lecturer, San Jose State (PhD 2020, USC)
Derek Litvak, PhD candidate, University of Maryland-College Park
Melody Shum, PhD candidate, Northwestern University
Caleb Smith, PhD candidate, Tulane University
Wallace Teska, PhD candidate, Stanford University
Grace Watkins, DPhil candidate, Oxford University
2021 Student Research Colloquium
Julia Bacchiega, Universidad de San Andrés
Serena Covkin, University of Chicago
Jelani Hayes, Yale Law School
Dipanjan Mazumder, Vanderbilt University
Rana Osman, University of London
Chao Ren, University of Michigan
Laura Savarese, Yale University (Herbert A. Johnson Fellow)
Magdalene Zier, Stanford University
Wallace Johnson First Book Program Participants
Brooke Depenbusch, Colgate University, In the Shadow of the Welfare State: General Relief and the Politics of Precarity from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan
Maeve Glass, Columbia University Law School, America’s Constitution: A New History
Timo McGregor, Postdoctoral Fellow Center for European Studies Yale University, Properties of Empire: Mobility and Vernacular Politics in the Dutch Atlantic World, 1648-1688
Myisha S. Eatmon, University of South Carolina, Litigating in Black and White: Black Legal Culture, White Violence, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies
Raha Rafii, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, Judges and Judging in the Islamic Near East: The Medieval Adab al-qadi Genre
J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History Participants
Lauren Catterson (Hendrik Hartog/Princeton University Fellow), PhD candidate, University of Toronto
Jon Connolly (Morton Horwitz Fellow), Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Chicago
Hardeep Dhillon (Harry Scheiber Fellow), ABF-NSF Post-Doctoral Fellow in Law and Inequality
Zachary Herz (Charles McCurdy/University of Virginia Law School Fellow), Assistant Professor, University of Colorado.
Naama Maor (Mary Frances Berry Fellow), Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago
Ángela Pérez-Villa (Rebecca Scott Fellow), Assistant Professor, Western Michigan University
Sarath Pillai (Hurst Alumni Fellow), PhD candidate, University of Chicago
Jake Subryan Richards (David Seipp Fellow in English Legal History), Assistant Professor, London School of Economics
Geneva Smith (Robert Gordon Fellow), PhD candidate, Princeton University
Lila Teeters (William Nelson Fellow), PhD candidate, University of New Hampshire
Lauren MacIvor Thompson (Reva Siegel Fellow), lecturer, Perimeter College
Kent Weber (Barbara Welke Fellow), post-doctoral fellow, Dartmouth College
Recipients of the Society’s Projects and Proposals Committee Funds
The Wheatley Peters Project, proposed by Cornelia Dayton, is an excellent, well-conceived and ambitious project that has already garnered positive attention upon its initial preliminary launch. It aims not only to make important historical documents available to a wider public but also to showcase historians’ methods of using such research in their work. It will provide transcriptions, interpretations and interactive commentary on key archival material related to the lives of Phyllis Wheatley, her husband John Peters, and other Black Americans during the eighteenth century. ASLH funding will help establish the site as a model of digital engagement and may help attract additional resources to the project.
The Digital Legal Studies Forum, proposed by Katrina Jagodinsky, encourages excellence in digital history by bringing together established and junior scholars in a productive
and thoughtful way. As the proposal states, Forum organizers “aim to bring talented new voices into the field, promote novel forms of scholarly interchange, and to seed new forms and venues for public history.” The event, a project of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, will draw dozens of historians, archivists, and scholars from around the West and Midwest, putting them in productive conversation with their peers, while also engaging new work that uses digital legal projects to explore issues pertaining to slavery reparations and treaty reconciliation. ASLH funding will provide needed financial support to make the forum a success.
Craig Joyce Medal
Sarah Barringer Gordon, Past President, ASLH