LACS The Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association

Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize

Submission deadline for books published in 2008: June 15, 2009

LACS awards the Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize every year. Named for the distinguished scholar and mentor of many Latin Americanists, this prize is awarded to the best book published on any aspect of Latin American, Caribbean, or Borderlands or Atlantic World history during the previous year by a LACS-SHA member.

Authors must be or become members of LACS-SHA in order for their books to be considered, and applicants must submit one copy to each member of the book prize committee (for a total of three) by June 15, 2008.

Book Prize Committee:

Juliana Barr
Department of History
University of Florida
Keene Flint 021
PO Box 117320
Gainesville, FL 32611-7320
jbarr at ufl.edu

Donna J. Guy
Department of History
The Ohio State University
210 Dulles Hall
230 West 17^th Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210
guy.60 at osu.edu

Mariana Dantas
Department of History
Ohio University
4^th Floor Bentley Annex
Athens, OH 45701-2979
dantas at ohio.edu

 

Past Winners

• 2008:
  
  Winner: Juliana Barr, University of Florida, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)

  Prize Committee's description: “Juliana Barr’s Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands, is a sharp, carefully crafted and sophisticated study of the Texas Borderlands that not only takes us into the worlds of the Caddos, Wichitas and Apaches but also engages with a revisionist literature on the concept of Borderlands, of centers and peripheries, and of diplomacy and dominance. The committee read many excellent books but we believe that Barr’s bold argument will have the most theoretical impact on Latin American history. It makes the strongest case yet that understanding gender is critical to understanding traditional politics. Barr deftly demonstrates that our own notions of the state, replete with the idea that gender is marginal to politics, has blinded us to a kind of "secret" history of Indian-European interaction in which Indians held power and shaped history.  It is a major contribution to the history of the Spanish empire and colonial relations and a welcome counterpoint to Mexico City-centric interpretations of colonialism and empire.”
  
  Honorable Mention: Noble David Cook and Alexandra Parma Cook, Florida International University, People of the Volcano: Andean Counterpoint in the Colca Valley of Peru (Duke University Press, 2007)

  Prize Committee's description: “Noble David Cook and Alexandra Parma Cook’s People of the Volcano: Andean Counterpoint in the Colca Valley is clearly and beautifully written. The research is breathtaking, stunning in its intimacy with the region. Remarkably illuminating on the importance of ecology and infrastructure, it will become a classic of ethnohistory.”

  
  2007:

  Winner: Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King:  Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)

  Prize Committee's description: Bianca Premo’s wonderful monograph is also a pioneering work, but in very different ways.  Premo delves deeply into the archival materials to forge a complex, nuanced and fascinating portrait of childhood in the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.  Bringing together legal, intellectual, and social history, Premo convincingly argues that the Bourbon Reforms helped forge a “new politics of the child” by the nineteenth century that reshaped and challenges notions of patriarchy.  One of the great contributions of the book is to show how patriarchy is a set of power relations based on age, caste, social class, and gender.

• 2005: Babara Ganson. The Guarani Under Spanish Rule in the Rio de la Plata  (Stanford University Press, 2003)
• 2003: Alejandro de la Fuente. A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)