History Professor Kate Brown has been selected as the winner of the American Historical Association’s 2014 Albert J. Beveridge Award for her book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013). The recognition marks the sixth award Brown has received for Plutopia. The annual Albert J. Beveridge Award honors a distinguished book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada, from 1492 to the present.
In a press release from the American Historical Association announcing the award, David Hollinger, the 2014 Beveridge Award Committee chair, commented that “[Brown’s book] counters dominant understandings of the Cold War couched in terms of divergent or separate paths. Deeply and multilingually researched in difficult conditions requiring perseverance in the face of official secrecy, courage in the face of personal exposure, and empathy in the presence of suffering, Plutopia adds to recent scholarship that emphasizes the costs of the Cold War in the places where it turned hot.”
The Albert J. Beveridge Award was initially established on a biennial basis in 1939, in honor of US Senator Albert J. Beveridge (Indiana, 1899-1911), a longtime member of the Association and an active supporter of history as both a lawyer and a senator. It has been awarded annually since 1945. The prize will be presented at the American Historical Association’s 129th Annual Meeting in New York City, January 2-5, 2015.
Brown’s new book, Disptaches from Dystopia: History of Places Not Yet Forgotten, will be published by University of Chicago Press in March 2015. For more information, click here.
For information on Brown’s prior awards, click below:
1.) Heldt Prize in the category of Best Book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Studies from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies
2.) Western History Association’s Robert G. Athearn Prize
3.) Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians
4.) American Society for Environmental History George Perkins Marsh Prize
5.) Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize sponsored by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Center for Russian and East European Studies of Stanford University
