LACS The Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association
Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize
Submission deadline for books published in 2007: June 1, 2008
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 four) by June 1, 2008.
Book Prize Committee:
Francie Chassen-Lopez, Chair
Department of History
1715 Patterson Office Tower
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506-0027Dauril Alden Department of History
University of Washington
Smith 315
Box 353560
Seattle, WA 98195-3560Susan Deans-Smith
History Department
University of Texas at Austin
1 Univ. Sta B70000
Austin, TX 78712-0220Bianca Premo
Department of History
Florida International University DM 397
University Park Miami, FL 33100Past Winners
- 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.
Honorable Mention: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (Stanford University Press, 2006)
Prize Committee's description: This bold comparative study of Spanish and Puritan discourses of colonization makes important contributions to the history of the Atlantic world. Based on a broad and deep reading of sources in English, Spanish (and occasionally) Portuguese, Cañizares-Esguerra cleverly and persuasively argues that the traditionally demarcated “differences” between Spanish and English colonization, and their demonological discourses, are in fact much more similar than historians have realized. Puritan Conquistadors provides stimulating and provocative ideas that will challenge all historians of the Atlantic world.
- 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)