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Murdo J. Macleod Book Prize

Prize & Past Winners

2023 Contest

Professor Murdo J. MacLeod was a historian of colonial Latin America and the Caribbean. He wrote, among other things, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History (University of TX Press, [1973], [1984], 2008).

We invite submissions for books published on Latin America, the Atlantic World, the Borderlands, and the Caribbean, time frame of study is open. The book itself must have been published between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2022.

Criteria for selection include: quality and originality of research, new and stimulating interpretations and writing quality.

Please include a cover letter with the name of the author, institutional affiliation, and a summary of the book.

Authors must be or become LACS members at the time of submission. See the membership page.

DEADLINE JUNE 1, 2023

Send one copy of the book to each to the following four prize committee members:

Prof. Robert Taber, Committee Chair
rtaber@uncfsu.edu
Mail to:
Prof. Robert Taber
220 Myrover St.
Fayetteville, NC 28305

Prof. April J. Mayes
Pomona College
April.Mayes@pomona.edu
Mail to:
Prof. April Mayes
History Department
Pomona College
550 N. College Ave.
Claremont, CA 91711

Prof. Matthew Butler
University of Texas - Austin
mbutler@austin.utexas.edu
Mail to:
Prof. Matthew Butler
University of Texas at Austin
128 Inner Campus Dr.
Stop B7000
Austin, Texas 78712-1739

Prof. Erica Johnson Edwards
Francis Marion University
ejohnson@fmarion.ed
Mail to:
Prof. Erica Johnson Edwards
Department of History
Francis Marion University
PO Box 100547
Florence, SC 29502

Past Winners

2022 Winners:

First co-winner: Tanalís Padilla, Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico. Duke University Press

Unintended Lessons of Revolution is a wonderfully thoughtful book. Through her powerful writing, Padilla has narrated the radical history of the postrevolutionary normales, rural teacher-training schools that are the subject of much activism as well as violence. In her study of the places and the young students in them, she recasts along the way the social and political history of Mexico. The book mines many different archives and sources, and includes many insightful interviews and personal accounts. Unintended Lessons of Revolution puts into focus stories and struggles not often told. This beautifully written book is an exemplar of socio-political research and methods.

Second co-winner:

Corinna Zeltsman, Ink Under the Finger Nails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. University of California Press 

Ink Under the Finger Nails is a theoretically sophisticated, deeply researched, and beautifully written account of the politics of the printshop in nineteenth-century Mexico. Zeltsman explores the different individuals and struggles, both religious and political, that comprised Mexico’s diverse printing scene until the Mexican Revolution. The book interrogates where, how, and why the public sphere took place in Latin America. She shows clientelistic networks of publishers and opinion formers, with the former celebrated as typeset warriors for liberal principles. Exploring issues of state formation and political culture, Ink Under the Finger Nails centers on the manual and intellectual labor of the press.


2021 Winner: 
Winner: Cassia Roth, University of Georgia, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil.  Stanford: Stanford University Press

In this thoroughly researched and remarkably written study, Cassia Roth examines the role of reproduction in nation-making. She focuses on Brazil during the First Republic, with special attention to its capital, Rio de Janeiro. Even though the new republic rested on democratic ideals and full emancipation, it also supported new forms of social control. A Miscarriage of Justice studies how the state limited citizenship, especially of poor women, by regulating reproduction and fertility. In doing so, Roth argues, the republican state cemented gender and racial biases that sustained the legacy of slavery.

Roth brings together legal and medical sources to analyze women’s experiences of reproductive health. The archival corpus includes 232 police investigations and court cases, almost 300 medical dissertations from the Rio de Janeiro Medical School, and 2,500 clinical reports from Laranjeiras Maternity Hospital. This body of documents enabled Roth to trace not only how authorities construed penal and civil criminality around women’s reproductive bodies, but also how women navigated and resisted regulation. The lives, frustrations, fears, and strength of the people in these documents vividly come to life in the pages of A Miscarriage of Justice.

The medicalization of motherhood was intended to guarantee the survival of the new nation. Authorities such as policymakers, obstetricians, and police officers, therefore, often viewed fertility control and negative reproductive health outcomes as an attack on the nation and tended to construe them as criminal acts. Roth’s analysis moves from the legal and medical ideologies of positivist criminal law and patriarchal civil law through obstetricians’ debates to curb abortions to women’s lived experiences of this legislation in the courtroom. Furthermore, Roth demonstrates that rumor, gossip, and notions of honor played critical roles in women’s decisions about their reproductive health, and fear of denunciations, investigation, or even death kept fertility control in clandestine circles.

A Miscarriage of Justice tells the stories of women that attempted to, and sometimes succeeded in, making decisions about their reproductive bodies in the face of a patriarchal state. With remarkable research, Roth situates women’s reproductive lives and deaths within the larger context of nation-making based on racial and gendered inequality that continued to shaped Brazilian society for decades.

2020 Winner: Amy Offner. Sorting Out the Mixed Economy. The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton University Press, 2019). 

 

2019 Winner: Dr. Elena A. Schneider of the University of California, Berkeley, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (UNC Press, 2018). 

2018 Winner: 
Bianca Premo. The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Honorable Mention (2018): Sasha Turner. Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 

2017 Winner: Benjamin A. Cowan. Securing Sex. Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 

2017 Honorable Mentions: 

Camilo D. Trumper. Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics and the Struggle for the Streets in Chile (University of California Press, 2016). 

Matthew Crawford. The Andean Wonder Drug: Chinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016).

2016 Winner: Victor Uribe-Uran. Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Stanford, 2015). 

2015 Winner: Alan McPherson, The Invaded: How Latin Americans and Their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations (Oxford University Press, 2014).

2014: Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

2013: Laura Matthew, Marquette University, Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 

2012: Melina Pappademos, University of Connecticut. Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)2011: Richard Graham, University of Texas at Austin (Emeritus). Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780-1860 (University of Texas Press, 2010)

Honorable mention: Virginia Garrard-Burnett, University of Texas at Austin. Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt 1982-1983(Oxford University Press, 2010)

2010: Edward Wright Rios, Vanderbilt University, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934 (Duke University Press, 2009)

2009: Brian Owensby, Empire's Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008

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

Honorable Mention: Noble David Cook and Alexandra Parma Cook, Florida International University, PPeople of the Volcano: Andean Counterpoint in the Colca Valley of Peru (Duke University Press, 2007)/span>
2007: Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King:  Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)

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)

Contact

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bradley.benton@ndsu.edu