Dr Nick Witham, Lecturer in US Political History at the Institute of the Americas, has been awarded the Society for US Intellectual HIstory's 2017 Dorothy Ross Prize.  The prize is awarded each year to the best article is US intellectual history written by an emerging scholar. Nick's article, "Popular History, Post-War Liberalism and the Role of the Public Intellectual in Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition (1948)", was published in the Historical Journal in December 2016. 

In awarding the prize, the committee commented as follows:

In this outstanding essay, Witham argues that Hofstadter's American Political Tradition has been misinterpreted. Although Hofstadter is often placed in the company of "consensus historians," Witham shows that rather than celebrating the American political tradition, Hofstadter was instead critical of Americans' excessive individualism and focus on property accumulation. Witham's essay pays close attention to the New York literary scene as well as developments within historical scholarship. It is contextual as well as textual: Witham examines the conditions of production of the book, including Hofstadter's political formation in the New Deal era and Knopf's decision to sponsor the fellowship that Hofstadter was awarded to write a popular history. Witham traces the rise of mass publishing made possible by the "paperback revolution" and the challenge of meeting Dwight Macdonald's critique of "masscult and midcult." He shows how Hofstadter worked to meet that challenge by crafting a narrative accessible to a wide range of readers. The American Political Tradition provides a complex and nuanced analysis, laced with irony and tragedy rather than the nostalgia and hero worship characteristic of much popular history. Making excellent use of the correspondence between Hofstadter, his editor, and his publisher, and also examining the reception and distribution of the book, Witham explains why the book was a commercial as well as critical success. This is intellectual history as it should be done. Witham's article is based on exhaustive research, offers incisive analysis of multiple texts in multiple contexts, and is written with elegance and flair.

Nick will be presented with the award at the S-USIH conference in October.