Annal:2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History

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Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Michael B. Oren

In Israel and the West it is called the Six Day War. In the Arab world, it is known as the June War, or simply as “the Setback.” Never has a conflict so short, unforeseen and largely unwanted by both sides so transformed the world. The Yom Kippur War, the war in Lebanon, the Camp David accords, the controversy over Jerusalem and Jewish settlements in West Bank, the intifada and the rise of Palestinian terror: all are part of the outcome of those six days of intense Arab-Israeli fighting in the summer of 1967.

Michael B. Oren’s Six Days of War is the…

 

At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

Philip Dray

It is easy to shrink from our country’s brutal history of lynching. Lynching is called the last great skeleton in our nation’s closet: It terrorized all of black America, claimed thousands upon thousands of victims in the decades between the 1880s and the Second World War, and leaves invisible but deep scars to this day. The cost of pushing lynching into the shadows, however—misremembering it as isolated acts perpetrated by bigots on society’s fringes—is insupportably high: Until we understand how pervasive and socially accepted the practice was—and, more…

 

The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade

Robert W. Harms

Based on an officer’s diary, a vivid and unprecedented account of the voyage of one slave trading ship—The Diligent—and the worlds through which it sailed.

The slave trade is one of the best known yet least understood processes in our history. The popular image of traders in slave ships going to Africa and rounding up slaves as if they were cattle is not only historically inaccurate, it also disguises the fact that the slave trade was a highly organized Atlantic-wide system that required close collaboration at the highest levels of government in Europe,…

 

Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller

Gregg Herken

The story of the twentieth century is largely the story of the power of science and technology. Within that story is the incredible tale of the human conflict between Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller—the scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction.

How did science—and its practitioners—enlisted in the service of the state during the Second World War, become a slave to its patron during the Cold War? The story of these three men, builders of the bombs, is fundamentally about loyalty—to country, to science,…

 

In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

Mary Beth Norton

In January 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts, two young girls began to suffer from inexplicable fits. Seventeen months later, after legal action had been taken against 144 people—20 of them put to death—the ignominious Salem witchcraft trials finally came to an end.

Now, Mary Beth Norton—one of our most ad-mired historians—gives us a unique account of the events at Salem, helping us to understand them as they were understood by those who lived through the frenzy. Describing the situation from a seventeenth-century perspective, Norton examines the crucial…

 
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