The Organization of American Historians has announced its 2021 awards winners. We were pleased to see former guest blogger Nate Holdren (Drake University) come away with an Honorable Mention for the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award. The citation reads:
Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press) is a beautifully written andmoving study that unearths the values and assumptions that shaped the development of workers’ compensation law in the early twentieth century. Through careful and rigorous research, Holdren highlights the moral and bodily consequences of this new legal regime for accident victims, compellingly suggesting that workers’ compensation law reinforces the injustices of capitalism rather than producing what he calls the “justice of recognition.” This book offers new and compelling insights for various fields of study, including legal history, histories of capitalism, and disability history.
The winner of the award was Garrett Felber (University of Mississippi), for Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (University of North Carolina Press).
-- Karen Tani