Gustave O. Arlt Award

Our Ed Blum has won the 2009 Gustave O. Arlt award for his Reforging the White Republic. From the press release:

Professor Blum’s book discusses the influential role that religion played in the reunification of northern and southern whites after the U.S. Civil War. He argues that northern religious ideas of a “white republic” justified and promoted racial segregation, ultimately leading to nationalism and imperialism. Yale University professor Harry S. Stout called the book “powerfully written…a first-rate intellectual and cultural history” and Rice University historian Michael O. Emerson described it as “one of the finest studies of race and religion ever written.”

Parenthetically, I used Reforging in a graduate seminar this past semester to good effect. The students appreciated the fact that the book introduced them to so many new storylines and themes absent from the other accounts of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age they had read: Reconstruction-era radical missionaries, Dwight Moody, the 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic, the WCTU, and the American-Filipino War.

It's pretty fine stuff indeed to have a book continue to win awards four years after its publication.