Annal:1998 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1998. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History
- History books
- History authors
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors.
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity
- 1998 LATimes–History winner
- 1998 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 16.48
Roy Porter explores medicine’s evolution against the backdrop of the wider religious, scientific, philosophical, and political beliefs of the culture in which it develops, and he shows how our need to understand where diseases come from and what we can do to control them has—perhaps above all elseinspired developments in medicine through the ages. He charts the remarkable rise of modern medical science—the emergence of specialties such as anatomy, physiology, neurology, and bacteriology—as well as the accompanying development of wider medical practice at the bedside, in the hospital, and in the ambitious public health systems of the twentieth century.
Along the way the book offers up a treasure trove of historical surprises: how the ancient Egyptians treated incipient baldness with a mixture of hippopotamus, lion, crocodile, goose, snake, and ibex fat; how a mystery epidemic devastated ancient Athens and brought an end to the domination of that great city: how lemons did as much as Nelson to defeat Napoleon: how yellow fever, carried by African mosquitoes to the Americas, led…
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
- 1998 LATimes–History finalist
- 1998 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 12.48
Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity.
Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation. As the nature of the slaves’ labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society.
In this brilliant and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
- 1998 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.48
On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Low-country, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South.
Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture
- 1998 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.48
The first social history of American beauty culture: a richly textured account of how women created the cosmetics industry and how cosmetics created the modern woman.
How did powder and paint, once scorned as immoral, become indispensable to millions of respectable women? How did a Victorian “kitchen physic,” as homemade cosmetics were called, become a multi-billion-dollar industry? And how did men finally take over that rarest of institutions, a woman’s business?
Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, historian Kathy Peiss uncovers a vivid history in which women, far from being pawns and victims, used makeup to declare their freedom, identity, and sexual allure as they flocked to enter public life. She highlights the leading role of white and black women—Helena Rubenstein and Annie Turnbo Malone, Elizabeth Arden and Madame C. J. Walker—in shaping a unique industry that relied less on advertising than on women’s customs of visiting (“Avon calling”) and conversation. From New York’s genteel enameling studios to Memphis’s straightening parlors, Peiss depicts the…
The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life
- 1998 LATimes–History finalist
- Score: 6.48
AIDS. Ebola. Killer microbes. All around us the alarms are going off, warning of the danger of new, deadly diseases. And yet, as Nancy Tomes reminds us in her absorbing book, this is really nothing new. A remarkable work of medical and cultural history, The Gospel of Germs takes us back to the first great germ panic in American history, which peaked in the early 1900s, to explore the origins of our modern disease consciousness.
Little more than a hundred years ago, ordinary Americans had no idea that many deadly ailments were the work of microorganisms, let alone that their own behavior spread such diseases. The Gospel of Germs shows how the revolutionary findings of late nineteenth-century bacteriology made their way from the laboratory to the lavatory and kitchen, with public health reformers spreading the word and women taking up the battle on the domestic front. Drawing on a wealth of advice books, patent applications, advertisements, and oral histories, Tomes traces the new awareness of the microbe as it radiated outward from middle-class homes into the world of American…
