The Bancroft pantheon

Virtually every great American historian of the postwar era has received the Bancroft Prize. The 2010 Bancroft Prizes have just been announced, and the winners are:

• Linda Gordon for her Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, about the celebrated Depression-era photographer;

• Woody Holton for his portrait of American’s second first lady, Abigail Adams; and

• Margaret D. Jacobs for White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940.

Past winners of the coveted Bancroft are a veritable pantheon. They include Alan Nevins, Page Smtih, William E Leuchtenberg, Bernard Bailyn, Carl Degler, Eugene D. Genovese, Robert Dallek, Sean Wilentz, Paul Starr, Eric Foner, Drew Gilpin Faust, Edmund S. Morgan, Samuel Eliot Morison, Stanley Elkins, David Levering Lewis, Walter LaFeber, Bernard de Voto, C. Vann Woodward, Paul Horgan, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

You may, of course, find most of their works at the Library.