For the last three years, women who studied at Columbia for their Ph.D. programs were among the recipients of the Bancroft Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the field of American history. In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re highlighting these Columbia-educated authors and examining what drove each of them to write their award-winning books.

Carolyn Eisenberg, author of Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia (2024 Winner)

Carolyn Eisenberg, winner of the 2024 Bancroft Prize for her book Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia, is a historian at Hofstra University.

In an interview with The Progressive last year, Eisenberg shared that Fire and Rain is the culmination of decades-long research using an expansive collection of declassified documents. Eisenberg’s narrative breaks down how the Vietnam War not only affected American veterans and citizens, but had a staggering human and ecological impact on the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. 

When speaking about what prompted her to write Fire and Rain during a virtual event with C-SPAN shortly after the book’s release, Eisenberg shared that she wanted to explore a question historians have wrestled with for decades: “Why did this flawed, costly, ill-fated, tragic Vietnam War continue over so many years?”

Eisenberg’s work, which considers this compelling question, was praised by the 2024 Bancroft Prize jury as “a sweeping, panoramic, and ultimately damning portrait of Nixon and Kissinger as architects of the wars in Southeast Asia.”

Fire and Rain will be honored at the 2024 Bancroft Prize Ceremony on Thursday, April 18, at The Forum at Columbia University. Register for this free public event here.  

Beverly Gage, author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (2023 Winner)

Beverly Gage, recipient of the 2023 Bancroft Prize for her book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, is a professor of 20th-century U.S. history at Yale University. 

In a story from Columbia Magazine, Gage shared that the inspiration for this book struck while doing research for her Ph.D. dissertation, “The Wall Street Explosion: Capitalism, Terrorism, and the 1920 Bombing of New York.” It was through this research that she learned Hoover had been charged with monitoring domestic radicals during his time as a young federal agent at the Bureau of Investigation.

Gage felt Hoover was “too important and too complicated to leave as just a one-dimensional figure,” which is a sentiment reflected by the 2023 Bancroft Prize jury:

“It’s not so much that the wiretapping, devious, destructive, and (above all) white supremacist Hoover misses the mark, it’s that this gets at only one side of him. What Gage restores to view is Hoover the nonpartisan, the state-builder, the professionalizer, the pragmatist, not in order to redeem Hoover but to explain how inseparable one part was from the other.”

Mae Ngai, author of The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2022 Winner)

Mae Ngai, recipient of the 2022 Bancroft Prize for her book The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University.

In a Q&A with the Libraries, Ngai shared that the book, which examines “how Chinese migration to the world’s goldfields upended global power and economics and forged modern conceptions of race,” is based mainly on archival research. Ngai looked at items such as mining-claims registers, tax rolls, payroll ledgers, census manuscripts, and directories.

When asked why she set out to write The Chinese Question during a LIVE from NYPL interview, Ngai explained she wanted to clarify that despite a common belief held by many respectable historians, Chinese in nineteenth century California were not indentured. Slaying this “coolie” myth was the impetus behind her research.

As the first book of Asian American history to be awarded the Bancroft Prize, Ngai felt that receiving this honor was especially meaningful:

“For too long, these communities and their histories have been considered marginal to U.S. history.”