YGSNA Members Receive 2016 Western History Association Prizes

November 9, 2016

At the 56th annual Western History Association (WHA) conference, current and former YGSNA members received multiple book, research, and article prizes. Held in St. Paul, Minnesota, the conference theme was “Expanding Western Horizons.” With over six hundred registered conference participants, the WHA attracted scholars from across North America. YGSNA members attended academic sessions, shared ongoing research and publications, and won multiple association prizes, including the Caughey Book Prize for the most distinguished book on the history of the American West, which was awarded to former YGSNA member, Professor Josh Reid (UW-Seattle) for his Yale University Press book, The Sea is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs.

Reid also won the Sally and Kens Owens Award as well as the John C. Ewers Award for the study of Pacific and Native American history, respectively. He was joined by current Yale History Department and YGSNA members, Alice Baumgartner and Holly Miowak Guise. Baumgartner won the Bolton-Cutter Award for the best article in Borderlands history for her Journal of American History essay, “The Line of Positive Safety: Borders and Boundaries in the Rio Grande Valley, 1848-1880,” while Guise won the Walter Rundell Award, a dissertation research award to support her ongoing inquiries into Alaska Native activism during the Second World War. (Photographed here along with Yale Professor Ned Blackhawk as well as former WHA President David Edmunds)

As part of the conference weekend, YGSNA members joined several of the tours of the area, including the “Native American Sites in the Twin Cities” tour led by Professor Iyekiyapiwin Darlene St. Clair, which explored the “old and ongoing relationship with the region” between Native and non-Native peoples.