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First Book Award

“First Communion, Breckenridge, Texas, 1925.” UTA Libraries Digital Gallery. 1925.

Eligibility

Committee members
Previous recipients
The Immigration and Ethnic History Society awards a prize to recognize the work of early career scholars in the field of U.S. immigration and ethnic history. The 2022 First Book Award will be presented to the book judged best on any aspect of the immigration and ethnic history of the United States and/or North America.

Eligibility

To be eligible for the award, a book must be copyrighted 2021, must be based on substantial primary research, must present a major new scholarly interpretation, and must be an author’s first academic monograph. The $2,000 award will be presented at the annual IEHS banquet in 2022.

A book may be nominated by its author, the publisher, a member of the prize committee, or a member of the Society. Inquiries and nominations should be submitted to firstbookaward@iehs.org by the deadline: December 31, 2021.

2021 Committee Members

Danielle Battisti (Chair), Ashley Johnson-Bavery, Carl Lindskoog

Copies of the book must be received by all three members of the committee by the end of the calendar year.

Previous Recipients

Ashley Johnson Bavery - 2021

Bootlegged Aliens: Immigration Politics on America’s Northern Border  

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

Danielle Battisti - 2020

Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform 

(Fordham University Press, 2019)

Rosina Lozano - 2019

An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (University of California Press, 2018)

Honorable Mention

Daniel Inouye, Distant Islands: The Japanese American Community in New York City, 1876-1930s. (University Press of Colorado, 2018)

Hidetaka Hirota - 2018

Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. (Oxford University Press.)

Honorable Mention

Rachel Kranson, Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America.. University of North Carolina Press.

Lori Flores - 2017

Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement. Yale University Press.

Adam D. Mendelsohn - 2016

The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire. New York University Press.

Ellen Wu - 2015

The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority. Princeton University Press.