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2013 Grace Abbott Best Book Award Winner: Robin Bernstein

The Grace Abbott Best Book Award Committee of the Society for the History of Children and Youth for 2013 was composed of four members: Daniel Cook (Rutgers University, Camden), Stephen Lassonde (Harvard University) Leslie Paris (University of British Columbia), Johanna Sköld (Linköping University).

The committee chose Robin Bernstein’s book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York University Press, 2011) as the Grace Abbott Best Book Award winner.

An excerpt from the committee’s remarks:

In short, Racial Innocence synthesizes a range of materials and methods to build a case for innocence as an important category of historical-cultural analysis. It is original, theoretically challenging, and adds fundamentally new insights to the history of childhood. It says as much about the past as the times we live in and is applicable as well to racialist discourse in children’s cultures trans-nationally.

For more on the book, visit Bernstein’s book blogfaculty page, and listen to this recent interview.