New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022
Andrew Carnegie Fellows Bookshelf: Scholarship with Impact
A selection of some of the notable books that have come out of the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program since 2015
Since 2015, the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program has awarded fellowships annually to exceptional scholars, authors, journalists, and public intellectuals, with criteria to prioritize the originality and promise of the research and its potential impact on the field, and the scholar’s plans for communicating the findings to a broad audience. Below is a selection of some of those notable books.
Margaret A. Burnham
2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow
By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
In this paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow–era violence, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of the mid-20th-century South and through to today. Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard.
Jack E. Davis
2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellow
The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird
The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jack E. Davis has written a sweeping cultural and natural history of the bald eagle in America. For centuries, Americans have celebrated it as “majestic” and “noble,” yet savaged the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Davis contrasts the age when native peoples lived beside the bald eagle peacefully with periods when, whether through hunting bounties or DDT pesticides, Haliaeetus leucocephalus was twice pushed to the brink of extinction. Filled with spectacular stories of Founding Fathers, rapacious hunters, heroic bird rescuers, and the lives of bald eagles themselves — monogamous creatures, considered among the animal world’s finest parents — The Bald Eagle demonstrates how this bird’s wondrous journey may provide inspiration today, as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale.
Jared Farmer
2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow
Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees
Humans have always revered long-lived trees. But as historian Jared Farmer reveals in Elderflora, the epic story of the planet’s oldest trees and the making of the modern world, our veneration took a modern turn in the 18th century, when naturalists embarked on a quest to locate and precisely date the oldest living things on earth. The new science of tree time prompted travelers to visit ancient specimens and conservationists to protect sacred groves. Exploitation accompanied sanctification, as old-growth forests succumbed to imperial expansion and the Industrial Revolution. Farmer surveys the complex history of the world’s oldest trees, including voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis. In a changing climate, a long future is still possible, Farmer shows, but only if we give care to young things that might grow old.
Masha Gessen
2015 Andrew Carnegie Fellow
The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
Masha Gessen, a journalist and best-selling biographer of Vladimir Putin, reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. A cautionary tale for our time, The Future Is History follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy in Russia. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own — as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, writers, and sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state.
Daniel Immerwahr
2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
We are familiar with maps that outline all 50 states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories — the islands, atolls, and archipelagos — this country has governed and inhabited? In this pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States, revealing forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. For example, we travel to Puerto Rico, where U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. How to Hide an Empire is rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today.
Michèle Lamont
2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellow
Seeing Others: How Recognition Works — and How It Can Heal a Divided World
The acclaimed Harvard sociologist Michèle Lamont makes the case for reexamining what we value to prioritize recognition — the quest for respect — in an age that has been defined by growing inequality and the obsolescence of the American dream. In this capstone work, Lamont unpacks the power of recognition — rendering others as visible and valued — by drawing on nearly 40 years of research and new interviews with young adults, and with cultural icons and change agents who intentionally practice recognition, from Nikole Hannah-Jones and Cornel West to Michael Schur and Roxane Gay. She shows how new narratives are essential for everyone to feel respect and assert their dignity. Building on Lamont’s lifetime of expertise and revelatory connections between broad-ranging issues, Seeing Others delivers realistic sources of hope: by reducing stigma, we put change within reach.
Timothy Snyder
2015 Andrew Carnegie Fellow
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe America
With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy seemed final. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. This faith was misplaced. Authoritarianism returned to Russia, as Vladimir Putin found fascist ideas that could be used to justify rule by the wealthy. In the 2010s, it has spread from East to West, aided by Russian warfare in Ukraine and cyberwar in Europe and the United States. The Road to Unfreedom is an unsparing chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism, based on vast research as well as personal reporting. Timothy Snyder goes beyond the headlines to expose the true nature of the threat to democracy and law. To understand the challenge is to see, and perhaps renew, the fundamental political virtues offered by tradition and demanded by the future. By revealing the stark choices before us — between equality or oligarchy, individuality or totality, truth and falsehood — Snyder restores our understanding of the basis of our way of life, offering a way forward in a time of terrible uncertainty.
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