March 16, 2022, 8:00 a.m. ET
An innovative study of Black Americans’
struggle against discrimination in transportation and a sweeping examination of
Chinese migration to goldfields across the Anglophone world in the 19th century
have won this year’s Bancroft Prize, which is considered one of the most
prestigious honors in the field of American history.
Mia Bay’s “Traveling Black: A Story of
Race and Resistance,” published by the Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, was described by the jury as “a major intervention in our
understanding of the civil rights movement and the everyday life of racial
domination,” which draws on “exhaustive and imaginative research in trade
publications, litigation records, memoirs, oral histories and the press.”
Reviewing the book for The New York
Times, Jennifer Szalai called it a “superb history” that turns “the
question of literal movement” into “a way to understand the civil rights
movement writ large.”
The second winner,
Mae Ngai’s “The Chinese Question: The Gold
Rushes and Global Politics,” published by W.W. Norton, was
praised by the jury as “an extraordinary book” that “brilliantly shows us how
much of the white Anglo-American world came to view the Chinese as a racially
unassimilable and threatening people.”
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