Tracy Campbell, the writer of “The 12 months of Peril: America in 1942,” has been named the winner of the New-York Historic Society’s Barbara and D
Tracy Campbell, the writer of “The 12 months of Peril: America in 1942,” has been named the winner of the New-York Historic Society’s Barbara and David Zalaznick Guide Prize, which is given every year to the perfect work within the subject of American historical past or biography.
The ebook, printed by Yale College Press, challenges the general public reminiscence of the warfare years as a time of nationwide unity and resolve. As an alternative, Campbell seems to be on the deep fractures inside American society a 12 months after Pearl Harbor, as a collection of defeats within the Pacific and the battle to create a beachhead in Europe appeared to convey the nation to the brink of army defeat and splintering from inside.
When the ebook was launched final Might, its resonances with the pandemic, which had struck with a Pearl Harbor-like suddenness and shock, weren’t misplaced on reviewers. George F. Will, writing in The Washington Submit, known as the ebook a problem to “the saccharine fable that ‘every thing modified’ in a nation united by the sense of ‘all being it this collectively.’”
Within the ebook, Campbell, a professor on the College of Kentucky, wrote that he had began enthusiastic about the ebook at an earlier second of nationwide shock, the 2008 monetary disaster. In a press release concerning the prize, he mentioned he hoped the ebook illustrated “the central significance of a functioning authorities, of people working towards one thing bigger than themselves, and the resilience and fragility of democracy.”
“We dwell in a second that demonstrates how we have to transfer previous comfy and reassuring myths, and to confront our historical past with a vital eye,” he mentioned. “A elementary premise of the ebook is that we are able to greatest perceive a society by seeing it below its biggest stress.”
The ebook prize comes with a $50,000 award. Previous winners embrace Rick Atkinson, Jane Kamensky, Eric Foner and Jill Lepore.