Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.
About the award: "The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize is awarded annually to the best book in the field of American legal history by an early career scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and early career faculty. The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference."
This year's award went to Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (University of Pennsylvania) for The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture and the Making of National Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). The citation:
Elegantly rendered and beautifully constructed, Sarah Gronningsater’s
traces the experiences of a formative generation of New Yorkers –
people born into the quasi-freedom granted by New York’s emancipation
laws. By using a varied and creative source base, Gronningsater
chronicles how their lives were shaped by gradual emancipation, and how
their experiences and struggles within that legal regime translated into
political activism in their later years. Gronningsater convincingly
shows how legal consciousness gained early in life connected a
generation of freedpeople who later used that knowledge to influence the
larger national conversation about citizenship and racial equality in
the United States.
Congratulations to Professor Gronningsater!
-- Karen Tani
