Annal:1998 Pulitzer Prize for History
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1998. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion
- 1998 Pulitzer–History winner
- Score: 10.48
With this authoritative and engaging book, Edward J. Larson examines the many facets of the Scopes trial and shows how its enduring legacy has crossed religious, cultural, educational, and political lines. The ‘Monkey Trial,’” as it was playfully nicknamed, was instigated by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge a controversial Tennessee law banning the teaching of human evolution in public schools. The Tennessee statute represented the first major victory for an intense national campaign against Darwinism, launched in the 1920s by Protestant fundamentalists and led by the famed politician and orator William Jennings Bryan. At the behest of the ACLU, a teacher named John Scopes agreed to challenge the statute, and what resulted was a trial of mythic proportions. Bryan joined the prosecutors and acclaimed criminal attorney Clarence Darrow led the defense—a dramatic legal matchup that spurred enormous media attention and later inspired the classic play Inherit the Wind.
The Scopes trial marked a watershed in our national discussion of science and religion. In addition…
Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America
- 1998 Pulitzer–History finalist
- Score: 6.48
Big Trouble begins on a snowy evening at Christmas time 1905 in the little town of Caldwell, Idaho, to which the state’s former governor, Frank Steunenberg, had returned to head his family bank while contemplating his political future. As he walked home that night, he sensed all about him the bold, exuberant, unashamedly acquisitive spirit of Caldwell’s young entrepreneurs, who—as his brother had written—were “here for the money.” Like so many in the West at that time, these brothers believed their prospects for enriching themselves were limitless, that the future opened wide before them.
And yet the governor suffered premonitions that he and his neighbors weren’t fully in control of their own destiny, that something malign threatened their well-being.
Now, as he followed the plume of his frozen breath, his boots crunching eight inches of freshly frozen snow, he turned through his garden gate and a bomb attached to the gatepost blew him “into eternity.”
Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History
- 1998 Pulitzer–History finalist
- Score: 6.48
Is civic identity in the United States really defined by liberal, democratic political principles? Or is U.S. citizenship the product of multiple traditions—not only liberalism and republicanism but also white supremacy, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, Protestant supremacy, and male supremacy? In this powerful and disturbing book, Rogers Smith traces political struggles over U.S. citizenship laws from the colonial period through the Progressive era and shows that throughout this time, most adults were legally denied access to full citizenship, including political rights, solely because of their race, ethnicity, or gender. Basic conflicts over these denials have driven political development in the U.S., Smith argues. These conflicts are what truly define U.S. civic identity up to this day.
Smith concludes that today the United States is in a period of reaction against the egalitarian civic reforms of the last generation, with nativist, racist, and sexist beliefs regaining influence. He suggests ways that proponents of liberal democracy should alter their view of U.S. citizenship in order to combat these developments more effectively.
