(NYT) — A wide-angled account of the decades of political and economic decisions that culminated in the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and a sweeping study of the policy of Native American removal in the 1830s have won this year’s Bancroft Prize, which is considered one of the most prestigious honors in the field of American history.
اضافة اعلان
Andy Horowitz’s “Katrina: A History, 1915-2015,” published by Harvard University Press, was described by the jury as “a masterful and gripping reconstruction of an unnatural disaster,” which is a “richly researched environmental, social, urban, and political history of New Orleans.”
Reviewing the book in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Scott Stern credited Horowitz, an assistant professor at Tulane University, with writing a book that stands as “an argument for the relevance of history itself.”
The second winner, Claudio Saunt’s “Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory,” published by W.W. Norton, was described by the prize committee as a “brilliant, searing account” of the 1830s policy of “Indian removal,” which resulted in “the state-sponsored expulsion of an estimated 80,000 native peoples from their homes east of the Mississippi River and brutal deportation to an ill-defined ‘Indian Territory’ in the West.”
.jpg)
.jpg)
