A study of the financial aspects of treaty relationships between Native nations and the United States and a sweeping history of legal discrimination against Chinese immigrants are the winners of this year’s Bancroft Prize, one of the most prestigious honors for scholars of American history.
Emilie Connolly’s “Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States,” published by Princeton University Press, examines the financial aspects of many U.S. government treaties with tribal nations. Rather than purchasing Native land outright, these arrangements kept the bulk of payment in trust, with future payments dependent on continued Native compliance.
In its prize announcement, the jury noted that accounts of westward expansion usually focus on violence and forced removal. “But Connolly reveals a quieter but no less devastating set of Native encounters with U.S. power,” the jury said, charting “the rise of a ‘fiduciary colonialism’ that led to the systematic expropriation of Native wealth over generations.”
Speaking in January on a podcast by the New Books Network, Connolly, an assistant professor of history at Brandeis University, acknowledged the topic of treaty finances may seem dull. “‘This isn’t actually boring’ is a constant refrain for me,” she said, laughing.
But the arrangements, which started in the 1810s, vividly illuminate not just government policy but the ways Native worked to preserve something of their sovereignty and power. “Native people had their own understandings of trusteeship, and reasons for embracing it,” Connolly said.
The second winner, Beth Lew-Williams’s “John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law,” published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, looks at the thousands of laws passed across the United States to discriminate against people of Chinese origin, starting with an 1852 California law taxing foreign gold miners. The prize committee called the book, which also chronicles resistance to such laws “a rich and vibrant history of unnamed (and misnamed) Chinese men and women and their world in the 19th-century Pacific West.”
In an essay last year in The New Yorker, Lew-Williams, a professor of history and director of the program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University, described her research trips to some of the hundreds of cities and towns in the American West where Chinese residents had been driven out by violent white mobs.
“When you visit small-town archives in the West, ask for records of anti-Chinese violence, and look like you might be Chinese, the apologies come quickly,” she wrote. In 1993, the city of Tacoma, Wash., issued a formal public acknowledgment of an attack in November 1885, when white residents armed with clubs and pistols forced roughly 300 Chines men, women and children out of the city. Only two decades later, Lew-Williams writes, did other localities begin making similar acknowledgments or apologies.
The Bancroft prize, which includes $10,000 for each winner, was created in 1948 by the trustees of Columbia University, with a bequest from the historian Frederic Bancroft. Books submitted for consideration — 246 this year — are evaluated for “scope, significance, depth of research and richness of interpretation,” according to the prize announcement.
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
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