Columbia department of history. Each year, the History Department select one of its leading historians to chair a panel of three jurors chosen from the finest scholars in the field, hailing from top three Research Universities across the country. We are delighted that cspans American History tv has elected to expand its partnership with us this year, by recording tonights program for airing and archiving on its website. We will circulate word when the Online Access is available. We are also thrilled that so many guests are joining us for tonights program. Which features brief interviews with the book Prize Winners and their scholarly works, delving into the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It is a joy to be celebrating books tonight. In addition to the important prizes that are awarded, the endowment left to columbias library by Frederick Bancroft enables us to continue to acquire those rare archival materials, and new publications of Scholarly Research conducted by historians around the world. It is a privilege to work alongside the very best staff working anywhere in libraries today, and to have such strong faculty champions and partners. And now it is my honor to announce our m c for the evening, dr. Andrew lippman of the Columbia University and Barnard CollegeHistory Department and the winner of the bancroft prize for history in 2016. Please welcome andrew lippman, associate professor of history at Barnard College and chair of the 2023 bancroft prize for history. Good evening. On behalf of the columbia and barnard History Department, we would like to welcome you all tonight to celebrate three remarkable books. Now, as and mentioned, beginning last year, the library introduced a new format for this ceremony, instead of having the winners give acceptance speeches, we are now featuring interviews with the authors. So we can really get into the meat of their book. Before we get to that, ive been asked to offer some short words about the jurys process and thinking. And i have to say, our work was only possible thanks to the absolutely stellar faculty and staff at columbia libraries, under the leadership of and thornton they offered us wise council and manage the complex logistics of managing, and planning this beautiful ceremony. On behalf of the jury, i like to thank you all. It makes us so much easier. I was similarly fortunate to work with two distinguished jurors, one unfortunately cannot join us this evening, so she sends her sincere best wishes to the winners. That is julia silver, professor of history and latin american and Caribbean Studies at nyu. And the other juror is here with us, that is margo canaday, professor of history at princeton university. Now, our main job as jurors was to read. Now, i elected for physical copies, and for several weeks i felt like the sorcerers apprentice, having unwittingly cast a spell that unleashed and endless parade of box after box into my office, filling 200 new hard backs on every new surface. But when the deliveries finally seized, we had divided the list into thirds, and in the end reading. Our final deliberations, we picked this eclectic bouquet. Three books that might at first seemed to be utterly unlike. They belong to different genres. Micro history, transnational history, biography. One can find us to Lower Manhattan in the early 17 90s, another takes us back and forth across the mexican u. S. Border in the first two decades of the 20th century. The other situate us around a Single Person who spent his entire life in washington, d. C. From 1895 to 1972. And yet, despite their differences, these books shared a number of important and admirable qualities. Each scholar dazzled us with their method and craft, whether combing through multilingual archives into countries, using troves of recently unredacted documents, or harnessing digital mapping tools to recreate a long lost city, block by block. Author historians relied on years of shoe leather work, exhausting every avenue sources to give their interpretations depth and command. Hes also writes in silky and inviting pros, and spooling, gripping narratives with vivid set pieces and fought to us that have all engaged general readers. But at the same time, each makes signal contributions to their field, that will excite academic audiences as well. And thematically, there are threats that connect them. I think all three winners can be described as political histories told at an intimate scale. Their stories all hands on the workings of the state, or overlapping states, and they all centered their analysis on a main character in search of justice. Lana sawyer, Ricardo Flores meghan, and john edgar hoover. In their journeys, all three overcome substantial opposition to achieve varying degrees of Popular Support for their cause. But all also find their goals undermined by bitter ironies, and also by painful betrayals and self betrayals. Perhaps the greatest talent, all three historians here tonight share, is their extraordinary sensitivity, the way to make profound points about the subjects with close attention to private details. Its there when gauge points out that at the very moment cal and coolidge appointed a 29yearold edgar hoover as fifth rector of the bureau of investigation, he was elated with this mother, kissing her good night going to sleep a lot in his childhood bedroom, and feeding his table scraps to his beloved puppy, speedy bozo. If theyre too in hernandezs portrait of the ambitious young radical journalist, Ricardo Flores, and his time in 1905, san antonio. As ricardos one good suit fell to tatters from over use, he got into the habit of backing out of rooms during his public appearances to avoid turning around reveal that the seat of his pants were covered in patches. And its there, too, when sweet depicts the far more harrowing details from the hot september day when a 17 year old alanna sawyer having just about a violent the night before, wander the streets and traumatized dazed, wearing her ripped and hastily repaired dress, and her blood stained shift underneath. These historians note that its all there in the details. Edgars precociousness, ricardos sense of dignity, lots unbearable pain. Its there in the literal fabric fabric of their subjects lives. These books are also about big things, as well as small things. They offer up complex insightjfc into the mechanisms and structures of power, in the form of a single man whose ambition was so massive it overshadowed the federal government. In the form of real and underrealized revolution, that could not be contained within borders. Or in the form of a elite that was asked, for the first time, to reckon with the unpunished crimes of its son. And that what makes them all, instant classics. Both timely, and timeless, studies that both speak to and transcend their moments. Book that will be red for decades. And now, the best part, the discussions with the authors. Im going to read the jury citation, and then invite them and their interest to stage. Our;pcnq y9x graduate student in the 1980s. I was working with christine stanzel at princeton at the time and. Its a story that at first i thought i understood. It seemed like a really vivid and welldocumented, harrowing case of acquaintance rape or date rape. This was right around the time that. Ms. Magazine first coined the term date to distinguish stranger and acquaintance assaults. And for a long time, thats really how saw the case. And i didnt really think i had thats really how i saw the case. I didnt think i had much to add to it. And then about 15 or 20 years ago, a graduate student i was working with came across a piece of evidence in a new york newspaper that its kind of threw me for a loop. It challenged by some things about the case. Made me curious to know more, and i began researching and poking around, and pulling at threads. And the more i learned, the more the story became. It turned out that the story went on for years after the trial. And in some ways, the more harrowing story became, and in some ways it seem to me, the more relevant off that, i think knowing how long ago you began the book, you must have been writing during the fall of 2017, when the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and the house take me to lead to a flood of revelations. Sexual salts by rich and powerful man, thats the story you tell. How did that moment sort of inform or influence your writing and process . Yeah. A couple different thoughts about that question. First, this is a case lanah sawyers prosecution, is a case involving a young woman from a modest background facing an elite man from a wealthy, and well connected family. And i think that it has that in common with a lot of the cases we hear about these days. The weinstein case, some other ones that are going to trial i think this week in the city. And i think thats kind of, that we focus so much on cases involving men we care about because of their wealth and power. Because we think they are people who matter. We know, from all kinds of research, that all kinds of men are sexual predators. And all kinds of men and women are survivors. And i think that obscures the real dynamic, the broader dynamic. Second, i would say that the me too movement, i think, was really powerful. It also has been rapinoe and andy clark were leveraging title ix regulations to help university do a better job of keeping students safe. And all of that activism really focused my mind on the extent to which i really wanted to put lanah sawyer at the center of the story. I try to make this a book to which the men kept trying to take over, but i try to make this a book, as much as i could, about lanah sawyer and her character, and her background, and her motivation. And her sense of what was possible. And the risks she was taking. Part of that, for me, was making it clear that this assault did not define lanah sawyer. Did not defined her life. It was a moment, and experience, an important experience, but i spent a lot of time researching her childhood, finding out when i cut about her background, her familys background. And i spent a lot of time trying to trace hard forward in time. To see how she recovered from what had happened. How she rebuilt her life, and quite literally, how she moved on. In the aftermath of all of this. So, this book has, pretty obviously, one primary audience the general reader, someone curious in this period and in the history. At the same time, we were struck, as a jury, at the amount of innovation and numerous interventions you are making as a scholar, as an academic. I was running if you could talk a little bit about how you balanced the needs of the interim public, and also wanted to write a book that your fellow academics would learn from and profit from, how did you manage that . As best i could . [laughter] this is a book that was based on a tremendous amount of research, or at least a lot of research for me. I did my best to uncover the evidence that was relevant. But its also a book that was informed by an extraordinary body of scholarship on early america, on the city of new york, on sexual assault, suicide. So, i was certainly feeling myself to be in conversation with other historians, but this isnt a book this is a book in which i wanted to tell a character driven story. And so its not a book in which i make a tendentious historiographical, scholarly argument. There are a couple things that seem to stand out for me. Looking back on this project. And one is, theres a real tension in this book, between how much has changed since 1793, its been more than 200 years, and how much has not. At the same time, one of the challenges i faced in writing this book, was telling the story of somebody like lanah sawyer, who was from a working class family, was a young person, was a woman. She was from a social class that was a modest means, but her family was poor enough that she was she had to work as a sewing girl, for relatively low wages, to help our family make ends meet. She was the kind of person who is very poorly documented in the archival records of early america. And in fact, if she had not responded to this assault in a really unusual way, that almost all or a large majority dont make public reports. If she hadnt done that, there literally would be no trace of her in the historical records. So to switch a little bit here, beyond thing about this person, this is also very much about a place. Now mentioned in conversation several times, how much i feel like reading your book, ive been to new york in 1793. Can you tell us a little bit more about the sources and maps you used to immerse your reader in this place and time . Yeah, i was very one of the things thats really rewarding for me, was learning about the city of new york, in this period. And trying to imagine the world that these characters inhabited. And i wanted to help readers bridge the 200 odd year gap between the city now, which is this big sprawling metropolis, and the city of new york in 1793, which was like 40,000 people, all living pretty much below city hall. And so, i tried to have readers visualize the city, as best i could, but describing the layout of the streets, and the views from public parks, and the buildings that i knew about. I tried to document the weather when i could, when i knew what the weather was. So i can think about what the air felt like, and whether it was wet or dry, or hot or cold. I wanted to know what buildings looked like. I want to know what the smells were. So there was a lot of visual and sensory information i wanted. I spent a lot of time, as you mentioned, trying to map the city. So i could figure out who lived where, and so i use a lot of the conventional historical sources like diaries and letters and newspapers and paintings and engravings and maps. But i also did things like, i walked the route that lanah sawyer and henry bedlow went on. And there was a dark room that was important to the trial, and i spent a lot of time, when i visited historic sites, i told the guides i close the shutters, just to see how dark it gets thank you so much. [applause] thank you, dr. Lippman, 4 am seeing this evenings program. Thank you to the jurors, and a hearty congratulations to all of our winners. Please join me in another round of applause for their dedication, and expertise. [applause] morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is jim byron, i have the honor of being the president and ceo of the Richard Nixon foundation, and i