Columbia University’s Bancroft Prizes offers an annual, timely opportunity to reflect on the complexities of American history and historical scholarship. This year, jury chair Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History and Deputy Director of Columbia World Projects, oversaw the selection of two groundbreaking books that explore how early legal, financial, and racial frameworks shaped the boundaries of American citizenship and liberty. Ahead of Independence Day, Katznelson discusses how these reframed histories challenge traditional national narratives, the evolving state of historical scholarship, and what a clear eyed understanding of the past means for democratic patriotism today.
Q: The Fourth of July celebrates the founding ideal of liberty, yet this year’s Bancroft winners focus heavily on historical exclusion and dispossession. How do these books challenge or deepen our understanding of what liberty meant in practice?
American liberty never has been uniform or undistorted. Tocqueville’s great appreciative 1835 volume on democracy in the United States concluded with a searing chapter on chattel slavery and the dispossession of Native people. The truth has been multidimensional. That we have to know, comprehend, and analyze.
Q: Beth Lew-Williams’s book uncovers the lives of Chinese immigrants who resisted exclusion. How does centering these often forgotten histories alter or enrich the traditional narrative we celebrate on Independence Day?
This timely and humane book rescues from obscurity the identities, lives, and tales of the all too many unnamed Chinese men and women who faced pernicious and pervasive legal restrictions in the Pacific West in the nineteenth century. So doing, it illuminates how this history shaped an enormous range of public law that became a constitutive part of the country’s continental expansion.
Q: Emilie Connolly’s Vested Interests highlights “fiduciary colonialism,” meaning the legal and financial ways the government expropriated Native wealth. Why is it vital for Americans today to understand this bureaucratic scaffolding alongside our political philosophies?
The exceptional political economy offered by this account effectively demonstrates how administrative arrangements, despite their formal appearance, are not neutral, showing in this case how fiscal rules and arrangements became instruments of domination yet also a tool for group survival. These lessons are germane for today’s efforts to remake the national bureaucracy to serve a particular set of often baneful policy preferences.
Q: There is an ongoing debate in this country about whether focusing on historical injustices undermines patriotism. How do you see the relationship between rigorous historical scholarship and healthy democratic patriotism?
A free civil society thrives on debates based on competing ideas and visions, past and future. Historians, of course, are bound by evidence, but their choice of subjects, modes of interpretation, and propositions about causes are inherently partial, thus open to thoughtful contestation. The crafts of history and democracy thus entwine.
Q: Out of the 246 books submitted this year, what themes or trends did you notice? What does current scholarship tell us about where our collective attention is focused right now?
I find it hard to generalize. The cornucopia of works considered ranged across centuries, locations, and modes of history, including biography, political thought, military comparative analysis, and much more. I was most struck by the heterogeneity and fecund density of the nominated books – a triumph for plurality!
Q: The Bancroft Prizes look for exceptional scope, research, and interpretation. During deliberations, what was the defining quality of these two winners that made the jury feel they were essential reading for the public?
These books are deeply researched and precisely narrated, at once analytical and rich with compelling stories, they are evocative and systematic, hard to put down.
Q: How are you planning to celebrate July 4th this year?
I will be in the UK, in Cambridge, so Deborah and I are likely to raise a glass with close British friends who study and teach the history, economics, and politics of the United States, with perspectives distance facilitates. And eat excessively.