SHCY Award Committee Reports for Years 2017 and 2018
Table of Contents
1. Biennial Article Prizes
1. SHCY Best Article Prize in French (2017-2018)
Winner: Antonie Burgard
Report from David Niget (Chair) and Manon Pignot (May 8, 2019)
Après avoir examiné 9 contributions, le comité a désigné Antoine Burgard, lauréat du Prix du Meilleur Article en Français de la SHCY pour 2017-18.
After reviewing 9 contributions, the committee nominated Antoine Burgard, laureate of the SHCY's 2017-2018 Best Article Prize in French.
Burgard, Antoine, « Retranscrire la violence et le traumatisme. Mises en récit administratives de la persécution dans l’immédiate après-Shoah », Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire, 139, 3 2018, p. 165-176.
Évaluation :
Antoine Burgard propose ici un article sur l’histoire des enfants juifs, rescapé.e.s de la Shoa, accueilli.e.s au Canada dans des familles, à l’initiative du Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), dans les années d’après-guerre. Il s’agit d’un excellent article, portant sur un thème pourtant bien étudié dans l’historiographie mais dont le traitement est neuf. En effet, il articule différents niveaux d’analyse : politiques de prise en charge des enfants et des jeunes et administration de l’urgence humanitaire ; expérience collective de ces enfants accueillis ; expérience individuelle de la Shoah et en particulier du deuil. L’analyse de la nature des sources, en particulier, est fine : l’auteur s’attache à comprendre la mise en récit des trajectoires des jeunes par les travailleuses sociales du CJC, mais aussi à saisir les « éclats de réel » produits par ces archives, qui permettent de « retracer une expérience enfantine de la persécution ». L’auteur donne à comprendre à la fois la spécificité de la perception enfantine de la guerre mais aussi la « conscience historique détenue par les enfants ».
Antoine Burgard’s article deals with the history of Jewish children, survivors of the Shoa, welcomed into Canadian families, on the initiative of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) in post WW2. This is an excellent article on a topic though well studied in historiography but whose treatment is new. It seeks to articulate different levels of analysis: the policies for the care of children and young people and the administration of the humanitarian emergency; the collective experience of these children; the individual experience of the Holocaust and mourning. The reflexion on the nature of the sources, in particular, is very subtle: the author endeavors to understand the narrative of the trajectories of the young by the social workers of the CJC, but also to grasp the "Fragments of reality" through these archives, which allow to "relate a childish experience of persecution". The author gives an understanding of the specificity of the child's perception of war and also reveals the "historical consciousness held by children".
Antoine Burgard est titulaire d’un doctorat en histoire de l’Université Lyon-II et de l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il est actuellement chercheur postdoctoral à l’Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (University of Manchester) et boursier de la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. Il conduit en parallèle un projet de collecte de témoignages de survivants de la Shoah au Canada, en France et au Royaume- Uni avec la Fondation Claude-Levy enfant juif caché (Strasbourg).
Antoine Burgard holds a History PhD from Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France) and Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada). He is a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (University of Manchester) and a fellow of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris. He is currently conducting a 2-year oral history project with the Fondation Claude Levy enfant juif caché in Strasbourg that aims to collect testimonies of Holocaust survivors in Canada, in France, and in the United-Kingdom
2. SHCY Best Article Prize in Italian (2017-2018)
Winner Rossella Raimondo, University of Bologna for “Cosmic education: arts and sciences as resources for human development” Studi sulla formazione 2018 (2)
Report Delivered by Stefania Bernini (Chair), Stefano Oliviero, Francesca Zaltron on June 12, 2019
Awaiting the Commending Paragraph.
3. SHCY Best Article Prize in Spanish (2017-2018)
Winners: Celeste de Marco and Alejandra Salomón
Report Delivered by Bianca Premo (Chair), Elena Albarrán, and Adriana Brodsky (April 4, 2019)
The committee received five excellent nominations, and has selected Celeste de Marco and Alejandra Salomón, "Voces y miradas sobre la niñez rural. Una propuesta para nuevas aproximaciones (Argentina, mediados del siglo XX)” Apuntes [Argentina] 83 (2018): 175-203.
Salomón and de Marco innovatively draw from oral histories and photographs of rural children in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina at mid twentieth century to interrogate the notion of “subjective well-being.” Bringing the economic history of rural Latin America together with the history of childhood, it argues that adults now resignify their experiences of poverty and lack of material comfort as children as not necessarily bad but indicative of support and family cohesion. Methodologically, the article creatively captures the turn in the history of childhood and youth toward problematizing childhood memories and the reading of visual sources without discarding them as inauthentic or flawed source material, and also points to the gap between scholarly social scientific approaches to “well-being” and the actual and remembered experiences of rural inhabitants over their life course. With pioneering attention to rural children, the article has broad ramifications not only for the discipline of history but for all social sciences that seek to understand the impact of economic deprivation on children and youth.
2. Annual Article Prizes
1. Fass-Sandin Article Prize in English (2017)
Winner: Julia Gossard
Report Delivered by Kelly Duke Bryant (Chair), Sacha Hepburn, and Nicholas Syrett (Sept. 14, 2018)
Julia M. Gossard, “Tattletales: Childhood and Authority in Eighteenth-Century France,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 10, no. 2 (2017): 169-87.
Focusing on children who attended charity schools in eighteenth-century Lyon and Paris and who complied with school regulations by reporting members of their families or communities for exhibiting immoral or criminal behavior, Gossard shows that parental, and especially patriarchal, authority over the family was not as complete as others have suggested. Indeed, through school-based surveillance and reporting mechanisms, some children could access certain types of power within the household, though in the service of another hierarchy. The committee praised Gossard for her efforts to understand children’s actions and experiences, even as she recognized the limitations of her sources in revealing motive, for her attention to hierarchies of age and gender, and for her compelling argument.
2. Fass-Sandin Article Prize in English (2018)
Winner: Emily Baughan
Report Delivered by Carla Pascoe (Chair), Sarah Duff, and Hugh Morrison (May 16, 2019)
Emily Baughan, University of Sheffield, for her article ‘International Adoption and Anglo-American Internationalism, c.1918–1925’, Past & Present 239:1 (2018), 181-217.
A committee comprising chair Carla Pascoe Leahy (University of Melbourne, Australia), Sarah Duff (Colby College, USA) and Hugh Morrison (University of Otago, New Zealand) selected Baughan’s paper from a strong field of 12 excellent articles submitted for consideration.
The judges found Baughan’s article a sophisticated and beautifully crafted consideration of child rescue and international adoption between Europe and the USA in the interwar period. This extraordinarily rich essay argues convincingly that particular kinds of children were useful in the making of an internationalism which sought to preserve a European social order rendered fragile in the aftermath of the Great War. Whereas histories of child adoption are often more nationally or culturally bound, this article contributes significantly to the historiography of adoption by offering an important international – indeed, transnational – perspective. In addition to this focus on international policy-making, politics and humanitarianism, the article also manages to show how global political machinations played out in the lived experiences of adopted children and their adoptive parents. Furthermore, it uses childhood history as an important lens by which to re-interrogate the interwar period, thus showing how a focus on children and childhood is important for a broader understanding of American history and international relationships.
The prize committee also commended K. Elise Leal, ‘“All Our Children May be Taught of God”: Sunday Schools and the Roles of Childhood and Youth in Creating Evangelical Benevolence’, Church History 87:4 (2018), 1-35. Leal’s paper presents a compelling case that historians of childhood have often neglected the ways in which religion has shaped children's lived experiences as well as shifting definitions of age categories. It insists upon the centrality of young people to American religious history during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing for a reinterpretation of that history foregrounding age as a category of analysis.
3. Fass-Sandin Article Prize in Scandinavian Languages (2017)
No award made as a result of a lack of eligible submissions.
4. Fass-Sandin Article Prize in Scandinavian Languages (2018)
Winners: Peter Håkansson & Tobias Karlsson
Report Delivered by Professor Anna Larsson, Umeå University, Sweden; Professor Astri Andresen, Bergen University, Norway; Associate professor Mette Buchardt, Aalborg University, Denmark (March 13, 2019)
After having extended the deadline för nominations to 15/2, we have recieved 11 nominations to the Fass-Sandin prize in Scandinavian languages 2017-2018. We have now discussed the nominations and now we are pleased to announce our decision. Please let me know if you need anything more from me.
The prize committee has decided that JHCY:s Fass-Sandin Article Prize in Scandinavian Languages 2017-2018 will go toPeter Håkansson & Tobias Karlsson, ”På spaning efter springpojken: Ungdomsjobb och sociala nätverk vid sekelskiftet 1900”, Historisk tidskrift 138, no 1. (2018) [Searching for the errand boy: Youth jobs and social networks at the turn of the nineteenth century]. The prize is given to the authors for ”a well written article based on a solid historical investigation that offer a significant contribution to childhood and youth history as well as labor and social history”.
Motivation in Swedish:
Priset tilldelas författarna för en välskriven och tydlig artikel som bygger på ett gediget forskningshantverk. Studien kombinerar kvantitativt material med minnesberättelser och analysen är skickligt genomförd. Det nätverksteoretiska perspektivet är välvalt och används på ett balanserat sätt som inte gör våld på det historiska materialet. Artikeln ger ett viktigt bidrag till såväl det barn- och ungdomshistoriska som det arbetsmarknads- och socialhistoriska forskningsfälten, och till sammanförandet av dessa.
3. Book Prizes
1. Grace Abbott Book Prize (2017)
Winner: Richard Ivan Jobs
Report from Elena Albarran (Chair), Abigail Van Slyck, David Pomfret (October 2, 2018)
After reading the submitted books, submitting unranked semi-finalists, and then ranking finalists, the committee is pleased to announce its unanimous choice for the recipient of this year’s award:
Rick Jobs, Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)
This beautifully written, rigorously researched book, embodies the spirit of the Grace Abbott Book Prize by placing youth at the center of regional—and indeed global—political processes in a way that fundamentally revises historical interpretations of European unification. He uses materials in five different languages from eight different countries, and uses the theater of Europe to project the dynamics of youth cultures from around the world. While he acknowledges “youth” as a socially constructed category of identity, he is also attentive to the ways in which young people themselves played an active role in shaping that social construction. The young people that trek their way across this book’s pages, geographies, and decades are agents of their own destinies, but also articulate their awareness of the impact that their mobility had on transforming social and political realities. Not only is Backpack Ambassadors a compelling and persuasive historical narrative, it is also a timely contribution to resurging discourses about European identity.
2. Grace Abbott Book Prize (2018)
Winner: Tera Eva Agyepong
Report from Laurence Brockliss (Chair), Richard Ivan Jobs, and Heather Montgomery (May 23, 2019)
GA Book Prize 2018 - Commendation:
The committee is unanimous is awarding the prize to Tera Eva Agyepong for her monograph on The Criminalization of Black Children. Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile System. 1899-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
Agyepong’s book on Chicago’s dependent black children pre-1945 is a master class in what can happen to a minority group in a quasi-segregated society where lack of resources and racial stereotyping collude to place disadvantaged black children on the margin of a system which in many respects was ahead of its time. It is based on substantive and deep research into a specific archival collection and is a profoundly moving study. Although the names of the individuals contained in the Cook County Juvenile Court Records cannot be revealed under Illinois state law, the author has successfully used pseudonyms to ensure that the experiences of children of colour are not dryly related but spring to life on the page. One of the most attractive aspects of the monograph is that it is compact and every word counts. This is a very impressive first book on a theme that should have been investigated a long time ago. It is an exemplary study. The monograph is a very professional work and will surely encourage other studies of the fate of black children in the juvenile system in other big American cities.
The committee congratulates the author on her achievement and wishes her well for the future.