News & Announcements
December 5, 2020
Cromwell Book Prize Winner
The ASLH announces the winner of the 2020 Cromwell Book Prize: Sam Erman (University of Southern California) for his book Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire, published in the Legal History Series of Cambridge University Press.
The citation reads in part: “For subtlety, nuance, and complexity of analysis by a junior scholar, this is the best book in a year in which many superb books were nominated. Erman makes important and ambitious claims about the evolving constitutional meaning of citizenship in the U.S. empire after the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898. The book vividly recounts and perceptively analyzes the debates between and among Puerto Rican and U.S. judges, lawyers, administration officials, and legislators over the denial of full citizenship rights to Puerto Ricans. Erman shows how post-Civil War conceptions of full citizenship, rights, and statehood gave way to a regime of constitutionally permissible racist imperial governance.”