The David H. Pinkney Prize
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Next Award Deadline: December 1, 2025 (extension to January 1, 2026 for books published in the month of December)
The Society for French Historical Studies awards the David H. Pinkney Prize to the most distinguished book in French history, published for the first time and with a copyright date of 2025 by a citizen of the United States or Canada or by an author with a full-time appointment at an American or Canadian college or university. Books focusing on any historical period or type of history may be considered, but unpublished or edited works are ineligible.
The winner, who receives an award of $1,500, will be announced at the annual meeting of the Society. The prize may not be shared, although an “honorable mention” may be named.
To apply: Publishers should send one copy of the submission to each of the committee members listed below. Please note that we accept self-nominations.
Committee Members:
Michael Lynn (2026) (chair)
Purdue University Northwest
2200 169th Street
Hammond, IN 46323 (USA)
mlynn@pnw.edu
William C. Jordan (2027)
232 Dickinson Hall
Department of History
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544-1017 (USA)
wchester@princeton.edu
Jeff Horn (2028)
Bellevue College
Social Science - D110
3000 Landerholm Circle SE
Bellevue, WA 98007-6406
jeff.horn@bellevuecollege.edu
Sarah Horowitz (2028)
Newcomb Hall
Washington and Lee University
204 W. Washington Street
Lexington, VA 24450
HorowitzS@wlu.edu
J.P. Daughton (2028)
Stanford University
Department of History
450 Jane Stanford Way
Building 200, room 113
Stanford, CA 94305
daughton@stanford.edu
About:
David H. Pinkney was an internationally renowned scholar of French history. He was best known for his books Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (1958), The French Revolution of 1830 (1972; translated and published by the Presses Universitaires de France in 1988), and Decisive Years in France, 1840-1847 (1986). He served on the faculty of the University of Washington department of History from 1966 until his retirement in 1984. In a memorial published in French Historical Studies in 1993, Gordon Wright wrote of Pinkney's three major books that they “together show an uncommon mastery of French history in the mid-nineteenth-century…they represent the work of a master craftsman.”
David Pinkney played a leading role in the remarkable postwar growth of the historical study of France in the United States and Canada. He was among the twenty-nine founding members of the Society for French Historical Studies; he served on the SFHS Executive Committee from 1956 to 1978. He was SFHS president for 1975-1976. He edited the journal French Historical Studies from 1966 to 1975.
2026 WINNER
Winner: Miranda Spieler. Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025.
Miranda Spieler’s innovative and original book engages with a set of significant historical issues, including the modern slave trade, emancipation, and the rise and importance of revolutionary notions of human liberty in the eighteenth century. At its center, Spieler articulates a cluster of conundrums. How is it that so many of these revolutionary ideas emanated from France, just as the country was becoming one of the leading participants in the slave trade? What was the experience of people who thought they had escaped slavery by reaching France—and Paris, in particular—only to discover that the interplay of ideology and practice re-subjectivized them? How did they negotiate such conditions? Based on considerable archival research, at the Archives of the Bastille and the Paris Court of Admiralty among others, the author captures the sentiments and predicaments of all the interested parties through the close examination of five cases, involving people of color who came to eighteenth-century France as slaves or freed people, but who did not find Paris the haven they might have wanted. Spieler’s analysis brings the situations of Jean, Pauline, Lucidor, Julien, and Ourika to life and allows us a glimpse into how they interacted with their neighbors, lawyers and the courts, their enslavers, and the police. She highlights the impact of slavery, and France’s colonization efforts, on real people. Spieler embeds these stories into a rich and dense sense of place providing a unique understanding of Enlightenment Paris.
H-France readers, please add this book to your personal and institutional libraries.
Past Winners
2025:
Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024
2024:
Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, Citizenship. (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Honorable Mention: H.B. Callaway, The House in the Rue Saint-Fiacre: A Social History of Property in Revolutionary Paris. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023.
2023:
Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss, The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV's France (Getty Research Institute, 2022).
Honorable mention: Emily Marker, Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell University Press, 2022).
2022:
Elizabeth Andrews Bond, The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2021).
2021:
Judith G. Coffin, Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir (Cornell University Press, 2020).
Honorable Mention: Nimisha Barton, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945 (Cornell University Press, 2020).
2020:
Emma Kuby, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight Against Concentration Camps after 1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019).
2019:
Mack Holt, The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France: Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477-1630 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Honorable Mention: Venus Bivar, Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
2018:
Sue Peabody, Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies (Oxford University Press, 2017).
2017:
Carolyn Chappell Lougee, Facing the Revocation: Huguenot Families, Faith, and the King's Will (Oxford University Press, 2016).
2016:
Ethan Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015).
2015:
John C. Rule and Ben S. Trotter, A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State (McGill-Queens, 2014).
2014:
Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Cornell University Press, 2013).
Honorable Mention: Rebecca Rogers, A Frenchwoman's Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria (Stanford University Press, 2013).
2013:
William Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan 900-1200 (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
2012:
Daniel Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975 (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
2011:
Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
2010:
Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France's Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902 (Columbia University Press, 2009).
2009:
Jennifer Popiel, Rousseau's Daughters: Domesticity, Education, and Autonomy in Modern France (University of New Hampshire Press, 2008).
2008:
Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Cornell University Press, 2007).
2007:
Hans J. Hummer, Politics and Power in Early Medieval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish Realm, 600-1000 (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and
Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2006).
2006:
Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and the Psyche in France, 1750-1850 (Harvard University Press, 2005).
2005:
Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
2004:
Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815 (University of California Press, 2003).
Honorable Mention: Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society. Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
2003:
Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2002).
2002:
Frederic L. Cheyette, Emengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Cornell University Press, 2001).
2001:
Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
2000:
Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in a Secular Age (Viking, 1999).
1999:
John Markoff and Gilbert Shapiro, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789 (Stanford University Press, 1998).
1998:
Thomas Brennan, Burgundy to Champagne: The Wine Trade in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
1997:
John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
1996:
Laura Lee Downs, Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914-1939 (Cornell University Press, 1995).
1995:
David Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (Oxford University Press, 1994).
1994:
Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres of Prerevolutionary France (University of California Press, 1993); and
Lester Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Cornell University Press, 1993).
1992 & 1993:
Raymond Grew and Patrick Harrigan, Schools, State, and Society (University of Michigan Press, 1991).
1990 & 1991:
Jo Burr Margandant, Madame Le Professeur: Women Educators in the Third Republic (Princeton University Press, 1990); and
Elizabeth Rapley, The Devotées: Women and Church in Seventeenth Century France (Queen's University Press, 1990).
Honorable Mention: Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
1988 & 1989:
Robert M. Schwartz, Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France (University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
Honorable Mention: Michael Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe (Yale University Press, 1988).