News & Announcements

November 1, 2024

ASLH Book Prize Winners – 2024

The Peter Gonville Stein Book Award

Yanna Yannakakis, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke, 2023)

Yanna Yannakakis’ Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico is a magistral work in global legal history.  Yannakakis offers an innovative account of how the concept and significance of custom developed through interactions among multiple legal cultures spread over two continents.  The book seamlessly shifts registers as it moves across vast expanses of time and space — from 12^th century Europe to 18^th century Mexico – and multiple levels of analysis.  The stunning scope of Yannakakis’ examination of law and legal theory is matched by her fascinating analysis of how Spanish colonizers and their colonial subjects navigated plural legal traditions to strategically define indigenous custom.  Drawing from a diverse array of European and indigenous primary documents, including a large collection of indigenous codices and legal petitions and disputes, Time Immemorial weaves together multiple sources of European and indigenous law with a rich microhistorical analysis of legal practice.  The result is a compelling story of how indigenous subjects of diverse social rank participated in the history of Atlantic legal culture.

The John Phillip Reid Book Award

Dylan C. Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Livewright, 2023)

Grounded in extensive and painstaking research in local court records, Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement brings to life ordinary African Americans’ multiple interactions with law and the legal system in the century that preceded the Civil Rights Movement. In making visible African Americans’ legal tenacity and sophistication when it came to everyday disputes over property, contract, and church governance, Penningroth shows not only that African Americans used the law for purposes that cannot be reduced to their struggles against racial oppression, but also how such uses of the law laid the groundwork for those struggles. As such, Before the Movement profoundly reshapes our understanding of the history of American civil rights.

The William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize

Michael Blaakman, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Michael Blaakman’s Speculation Nation makes a compelling case for placing land speculation at the very center of our understanding of the American project.  Blaakman demonstrates how the public domain was constructed – and how legislators actively created a secondary market for futures and speculative rights to land on the frontier.  These land grants, contingent though they were, often predated and essentially presaged the dispossession of Native Americans.  Lucid, deeply researched, and beautifully rendered, Speculation Nation shows, in exquisite detail, how this process unfolded in the aftermath of the American Revolution.