Thomas Paterson, professor emeritus of history, is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award.

He is the 2008 winner of the Norman and Laura Graebner Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the premier professional association for diplomatic history. The award will be given at the annual meeting of the society at Ohio State University on June 28.

The prize recognizes a senior historian of United States foreign relations who has significantly contributed to the development of the field through scholarship, teaching and/or service, during his or her career.

President Michael J. Hogan, also a historian, praised Paterson for his work.

“Over a long and distinguished career, Tom has been a prolific author of many books and articles, including a book we edited together,” Hogan says.

“He was an extremely popular undergraduate teacher, and the mentor of many successful graduate students, including one who now holds the professorship I used to hold at Ohio State. He has also been a leader in our professional association, which is now honoring him with its Distinguished Service Award.”

Paterson joined the UConn faculty in 1967 and retired in 1997. During that time he worked with more than 30 doctoral students who have become teacher-scholars and public servants.

Standing before an audience of about 25 academics, all professors and graduate students specializing in the Middle Ages, in a chilly classroom on the vast campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Jeff Persels, a lanky associate professor of French and director of European studies at the University of South Carolina, was reading aloud a scholarly paper at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies. The paper's title was "The Wine in the Urine: Managing Human Waste in French Farce." The paper was about, well, the wine in the urine, or perhaps the urine in the wine. Its topic is a 15th-century farce, or lowlife comic drama, about an adulterous wife who uses a wine bottle as an impromptu chamber pot, with predictably gross results involving her husband and her lover.

Persels's paper didn't discuss the play simply as an example of Rabelaisian-style scatology, however. The perspective he used was the postmodernist discipline of "cultural studies," which means pushing works of literature (or movies or television shows or ad campaigns or whatever) through a Marxist cheesegrater as examples of the way society conditions its members to accept the views of a dominant class. In Persels's view, the wine-bottle farce marked a stage in the development of what he called the "bourgeois fecal habitus." Translated out of postmodern-ese into plain English, that means the tendency of uptight middle-class people not to want to talk in public about matters pertaining to the bathroom and to assume that those who do are kind of crude. "The excretory experience became associated with the proletariat," Persels explained. Although he seemed eager to demonstrate that he personally didn't share those uptight middle-class views, at least one of the academics in his audience remained unconvinced that a secret bourgeois habitus didn't lurk underneath his antinomian veneer. "Excretory?" she whispered to a fellow medievalist sitting next to her. "Why doesn't he just say shit?"

And you thought that the Middle Ages was all about jousting knights and damsels in distress. That's because you have never attended the medievalists' congress, the annual first-weekend-in-May ritual at Western Michigan where Persels read his wine-bottle theorizing and where it is definitely not your grandfather's Middle Ages. Persels's paper was part of a Thursday morning panel titled "Waste Studies: Excrement in the Middle Ages" and devoting a full hour and a half to human effluvia. The other two scholars that morning read papers dealing with excrement in Icelandic sagas and the theology of latrines.

Waste studies is a brand new academic discipline invented by Susan Signe Morrison, a dark-haired, extroverted 49-year-old professor of English at Texas State University's San Marcos campus and mother of two (her husband is also an English professor) who organized the session and admitted with good-humored candor in an email that her new field's disgust-provoking subject matter might be a "challenge" to scholars thinking about specializing in it. Morrison's own specialty as a medievalist used to be women on pilgrimages, but then she got the idea for her latest book, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics, forthcoming this September. In her email she explained that the idea for the fecal book came to her partly because she noticed that dung and privies played a role in the works of Chaucer, Dante, and other medieval authors, and partly because her "son was potty-training." And so a new scholarly industry was born.....

MOUNT VERNON, Va. – The fourth annual $50,000 George Washington Book Prize, honoring the most important new book about America’s founding era, was awarded at Mount Vernon on May 29 to Marcus Rediker for The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking, 2007). In this bicentennial year of the abolition of the slave trade, Rediker – a prize-winning author who chairs the history department at the University of Pittsburgh – was honored for his definitive and painfully evocative account of the floating prisons that carried an estimated 12.4 million Africans across the “Middle Passage” of the Atlantic to help build the new America.

One of the largest book awards in the country, the George Washington Book Prize is sponsored by Washington College in Chestertown, Md., the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington's Mount Vernon.
A social historian, Rediker’s subject is not only the slave ships – vessels of such terror they had to be outfitted with special netting to prevent the desperate Africans from throwing themselves overboard – but also the kidnapped Africans and their many individual histories and attempts at resistance; the common sailors who were their prison guards, tormentors and sometime fellow victims; and the necessarily brutal ships’ captains who were the agents of a new global capitalism made possible by the trade in human life.

“One of the things I wanted to do in this book was to make our understanding of the slave trade concrete – hence, my subtitle, ‘a human history’ – because I think our capacity to live with injustice depends to some extent on making it abstract,” said Rediker, whose fierce opposition to the death penalty was the inspiration for The Slave Ship and its exploration of what he describes as the historic connection between race and terror. “The George Washington Book Prize is a tremendous honor, and a surprise. I grew up in the South, went to high school in Virginia, so George Washington and the Virginia aristocracy always loomed large in my mind. It’s where I first came to understand issues of race and class and I’ve been working on them ever since.”

The award was presented to Rediker at a black-tie dinner -- complete with fireworks and candlelit tours of Washington’s Mansion -- attended by some 300 luminaries from the worlds of book publishing, politics, journalism and academia. The Mount Vernon event also celebrated the works of the two other finalists: Woody Holton for Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang) and Jon Latimer for 1812: War with America (Belknap/Harvard). The books were selected by a three-person jury of distinguished American historians, including Robert L. Middlekauff of the University of California at Berkeley, chair; Elizabeth A. Fenn of Duke University; and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, director of Monticello’s International Center for Jefferson Studies and professor of history at the University of Virginia.

In their report on the winning entry, the jurors wrote that “Rediker shares one quality with the demographers who study the slave trade, he respects evidence and uses it in the telling of slave history. But it is not the numbers of people that interest him (though he reports the horrifying figures demographers give on the extent of the trade), it is the experience of these people. His is a ‘human history,’ his book’s subtitle that may seem redundant, but isn’t. Virtually every aspect of the story of where the slaves were from, how they were captured and imprisoned, transported to slave ships, and their treatment on board is covered….Along the way the reader learns much, not only about the slaves but also about the men who owned the ships and ran them….Rediker describes his book as ‘painful’; it was surely painful to write. Despite the emotional cost to its author, it is beautifully written. Indeed the book is, in its use of evidence and its determination to expose the bleakness of the slave experience, evocative and moving, and deeply instructive in unsuspected ways.”

Rediker’s book was named the winner by a panel of two representatives from each of the three institutions that created and sponsor the prize -- Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association – plus historian Patricia Bonomi of New York University.

“For more than 200 years, Americans have been engaged in an ongoing – and sometimes contentious – conversation about the meaning and significance of our founding era,” said Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, which administers the prize. “The George Washington Book Prize honors books that contribute fresh insights to that national conversation, and that approach history as a literary art. Rediker’s book succeeds marvelously on both counts: it is a majestic, even poetic book, profoundly moral but never moralistic, and suffused with a sense of deep human sympathy.”

“Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship is a brilliant, exhaustive and deeply humane work of scholarship, which, although it is a history that encompasses every country in the Atlantic World, nonetheless shaped the Founding Era in profound ways,” said James G. Basker, President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. “The legacy of this history remains one of our challenges in America today.”

Created in 2005, the George Washington Book Prize was awarded in its inaugural year to Ron Chernow for Alexander Hamilton and in 2006 to Stacy Schiff for A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. This is the second time it has been awarded for a book on the slave trade – last year it went to Charles Rappleye for Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution.

About the Sponsors of the George Washington Book Prize

Washington College was founded in 1782, the first institution of higher learning established in the new republic. George Washington was not only a principal donor to the college, but also a member of its original governing board. He received an honorary degree from the college in June 1789, two months after assuming the presidency. The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, founded in 2000, is an innovative center for the study of history, culture and politics, and fosters excellence in the art of written history through fellowships, prizes, and student programs.


Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History promotes the study and love of American history. The Institute serves teachers, students, scholars, and the general public. It helps create history-centered schools, organizes seminars and programs for educators, produces print and electronic publications and traveling exhibitions, sponsors lectures by eminent historians, and administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in every state through its partnership with Preserve America. The Institute also awards the Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and George Washington Book Prizes, and offers fellowships for scholars to work in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. The Institute maintains two websites, www.gilderlehrman.org and the quarterly online journal www.historynow.org.
With its new Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association has created the equivalent of a presidential library for George Washington. “We want to be the first place people think of when they have a question about George Washington,” noted James Rees, Mount Vernon’s Executive Director. “The George Washington Book Prize is an important component in our aggressive outreach program to historians, teachers, and students.”