DAN DAVID PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT 2024

Cécile Fromont

In 1728, enslaved African Pedro José leaped on top of a sword planted tip up on the ground of a plaza in the Portuguese city of Porto without impaling himself. Eleven witnesses testified in 1689 that Antonio de Salinas, a free black fisherman from Cartagena in today’s Colombia, survived the blow of a cannonball to his chest. It was reported that bullets could not hurt 1760s Jamaican slave revolt leader Tacky, who caught them in his hand and hurled them back. Across the Atlantic, and across imperial lines, small bundles of carefully chosen ingredients lent the three men (and many others) empowerment and protection against bodily harm in the face of the violent circumstances of lives in the shadow of slavery. Widespread and inconspicuous, these extraordinarily efficient Afro-Atlantic bundles played a key role in defining power and the modes of its exercise in the long eighteenth century. “I was always fascinated by the traces of use on objects, that you could see or you could touch with your fingers, events that had happened through these objects and that created a connection between you in this moment and the past,” says Cécile Fromont, a historian of the visual and material culture of Africa in an Atlantic perspective (1500 - 1800).

Cat Jarman

Towards the end of the 9th century, the Great Viking Army invaded England, a much larger invasion than previous raids and with a different intention: Settlement and political conquest. In 873, the army wintered in Repton, Derbyshire - and the remains of their camp contained a charnel deposit. Although most of the Repton dead were men, a small number of women and children were also buried there. Traditional views of the Viking Age led archaeologists to assume these were local wives or slaves taken by the migrating Scandinavian men, with the assumption that women were not part of the outwards movements from Scandinavia. However, new bioarchaeological techniques, such as isotope analysis, revealed that the women came from the same migrant backgrounds as the army’s men. Taken together with other archaeological and historical sources, this allows for a reassessment of women’s roles in Viking Age society. “I especially like working with human remains because with things like isotope analysis, we can actually start to unravel the stories of those individuals. By challenging what we thought we knew about them, we can actually get to a much more informed place about how those societies worked and the impact they had on a global scale,” says Cat Jarman, a bioarchaeologist specializing in the study of diet and migration in past societies.

Daniel Jutte

In 1640s England, the Puritan parliament called for the destruction of all monuments that they felt represented idolatry and superstition - in other words, Catholic or popish practices. Among these were stained glass windows in churches. The iconoclasts who carried out this destruction recorded their actions with glee. Richard Culmer took it upon himself to climb up “the top of a city ladder, near sixty steps high,” to smash a window depicting the sainted archbishop Thomas Becket at Canterbury cathedral. He recorded his delight in “rattling down proud Becket’s glassy bones” and considered it a privilege to destroy these “fruits and occasions of idolatry.” “When you study something that is seemingly inconspicuous, that pretends not to be there, that’s where I feel I can make a contribution as a cultural historian, by studying the history of materiality, the history of objects,” says Daniel Jütte, a historian of Early Modern European history with a particular interest in cultural history.

Ben Brose

In the fall of 629, Xuanzang, a twenty-nine-year-old Buddhist monk, left the capital of China to begin a pilgrimage through the deserts and mountains of Central Asia and into India. His goal was to locate and study authentic Buddhist doctrine and practice, then bring the true teachings back to his homeland. Over the course of nearly seventeen years, he walked thousands of miles and visited hundreds of Buddhist monasteries and monuments. When Xuanzang finally returned to China, he brought with him a treasure trove of new texts, relics and icons. This transmission of Indian teachings to China was a landmark moment in the history of the Buddhist tradition. “I’ve always been interested in religion, in history, especially the nature of belief, why people think and believe the things that they do, and how stories shape our understandings of the present. With Xuanzang’s journey, it’s really one of the most consequential stories in the history of Chinese culture, familiar to everybody but understood differently by different people,” says Benjamin Brose, a cultural historian of Buddhism and Asian religion.

Stuart Mcmanus

These enslaved people had been captured in Angola by an alliance of Portuguese merchants and African mercenaries, placed on a ship owned by a converso - person of Jewish descent - who also traded in goods from Europe and Asia, and were en route to New Spain when they were captured. Their story must be understood in the context of a sprawling early modern world, where enslaved people were traded alongside silks, ceramics and spices. American slavery was the product of global forces that spanned the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Africa and Asia. “The slave trade wasn’t just a trans-Atlantic or hemispheric phenomenon, but touched large parts of the renaissance or Early Modern world…To get a true picture of the slave trade in 1619, we really have to take this sort of global perspective,” says Stuart M. McManus, a historian of the global Renaissance.

Keisha Blain

In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, a working-poor Black woman in Chicago, began holding public meetings to persuade Black men and women to join her newly established organization, the Peace Movement of Ethiopia. Speaking in city parks and on street corners, this "street scholar" called on them to come together to build an autonomous Black nation state with full access to the rights and freedom denied to them on US soil. By 1940, the Peace Movement of Ethiopia had become the largest Black nationalist organization established by a woman in the United States. It drew an estimated 300,000 supporters and provided a significant space for Black people to address the most pressing issues of the day and forge transnational and transracial alliances with activists across the world. Gordon’s story is an example of the significant, yet often hidden, roles working-poor Black women have played in shaping national and global politics. “As a black woman, it matters so much to me to tell the stories of individuals who look like me. I'm committed to centering the voices, the ideas, the activities of individuals, who are so often overlooked in our nation's history,” says Keisha. N. Blain, a historian of black internationalism and black women’s activism in the 20th century United States.

Kathryn Olivarius

Ralph Roanoke was a young white man from Connecticut, who came to New Orleans in the middle of the 19th century to work in the cotton industry. In the summer, yellow fever ravaged the city. It was an incurable and highly lethal mosquito-borne virus, which killed half of all victims, while conferring lifetime immunity on the survivors. Roanoke faced a terrible choice: he could leave the city and save his life, but lose his job - or he could stay and risk death, but gain the coveted status of an “acclimated citizen” if he survived. Roanoke first left, but finding it so hard to find employment returned the following summer to face the epidemic. Having only just survived, he declared: “Victory had perched upon my banner. I was an acclimated citizen, and as such, received into full favor in the city of New-Orleans, where they distrust every body, and call them non residents, until they become endorsed by the yellow fever.” “...it was very interesting when our own pandemic broke out. I started writing this book long before that, and it's striking to me how many of the themes of my work feel anachronistic, on how disease was essentially used by the powerful in our societies to increase, not ameliorate, social and economic inequality,” says Kathryn Olivarius, a historian of disease and capitalism in the antebellum South of the United States.

Tripurdaman Singh

The First Amendment to India’s Constitution – seeking to reduce the scope of the right to freedom of speech; the right to freedom from discrimination; and the right to property – was a far-reaching and contentious piece of legislation, triggering some of the fiercest debates India’s parliament has ever witnessed. The Opposition was livid and believed this was an executive power grab that sought to muzzle them for good. A moment during the debate captured the dramatic and political tension perfectly: As a prominent opposition leader was savaging the bill in parliament and complaining that it was an unnecessary clampdown on free speech, New Delhi was hit by a sudden storm. So suddenly did the wind and rain build up, that even the skylights and ventilators couldn’t be closed and many MPs got drenched. Power gave out, plunging the chamber in gloom. To guffaws, H.V. Kamath – a Congress MP opposing his own government’s policies – remarked: “freedom of speech is being taken away, and there is a storm over it”. “One of the reasons that I like to work on India, and I find it an inordinately fascinating subject, is because the past is alive in India in so many different ways. People are still fighting over what happened 500 years ago, those are live electoral and political issues,” says Tripurdaman Singh, a historian of colonialism, decolonization and the birth of democracy in modern South Asia.

Katarzyna Person

In the autumn of 1940, just as the Warsaw Ghetto was being sealed off, historian Emanuel Ringelblum gathered a group of pre-war intellectuals to jointly create the clandestine archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. The aim was to write a full history of the Warsaw Ghetto, including all voices of its inhabitants, many of which were not part of the historical narrative before, among them women, children, refugees, those dying of hunger and those considered to be collaborators. Each of them was given space to leave their testimony. As Ringelblum wrote: “we are writing history, however complex it may be.” "The work of Emanuel Ringelblum and his associates is all about urgency. It's about the urgency to document the suffering of one's own people, it's about the bravery of listening to the diversity of voices, whether we agreed with them or not,” says Katarzyna Person, a historian of Holocaust archives and the recovery of marginalized voices.