Alumni News
Two William & Mary alumni, both undergraduate history majors, have earned prizes for their scholarship.
Michael Blaakman, recently tenured Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University, received the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press). The prize recognizes the best first book in American History. The award committee called the book an "important and revelatory study" that "explains how property, finance, and racism developed in early America."
Samantha Payne, an assistant professor at the College of Charleston, has won two awards for her dissertation, “The Last Atlantic Revolution: Reconstruction and the Struggle for Democracy in the Americas, 1861-1912": the Nevins Prize for the best dissertation on American history and the Betty Unterberger Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). A section of the dissertation also won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Prize for best article in any field of history. The Nevins Prize committee wrote, "Reading Payne reminds us that discoveries by historians can break your heart, but in the hands of a scholar with humane commitments, those discoveries can sometimes help us imagine routes to a better future."
