Nicholas Berthelot Lemann is the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999.
The Pulitzer Prize for History, administered by Columbia University, is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It has been presented since 1917 for a distinguished book about the history of the United States. Thus it is one of the original Pulitzers, for the program was inaugurated in 1917 with seven prizes, four of which were awarded that year. The Pulitzer Prize program has also recognized some historical work with its Biography prize, from 1917, and its General Non-Fiction prize, from 1952.
The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration, or the Black Migration, was the movement of six million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. In every U.S. Census prior to 1910, more than 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the American South. In 1900, only one-fifth of African Americans living in the South were living in urban areas. By the end of the Great Migration, over 50 percent of the African-American population remained in the South, while a little less than 50 percent lived in the North and West, and the African-American population had become highly urbanized. By 1960, of those African Americans still living in the South, half now lived in urban areas, and by 1970, more than 80 percent of African Americans nationwide lived in cities. In 1991, Nicholas Lemann wrote that:
The Great Migration was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements in history—perhaps the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation. In sheer numbers it outranks the migration of any other ethnic group—Italians or Irish or Jews or Poles—to [the United States]. For blacks, the migration meant leaving what had always been their economic and social base in America, and finding a new one.
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive the Pulitzer.
Bernard Bailyn is an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He has been a professor at Harvard University since 1953. Bailyn has won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice. In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture. He was a recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal. He is married to MIT Professor of Management Lotte Bailyn and is the father of Yale astrophysicist Charles Bailyn and Stony Brook Linguist John Bailyn.
The Black Belt is a region of the Southern United States. The term originally described the prairies and dark fertile soil of central Alabama and northeast Mississippi. Because this area in the 19th century was historically developed for cotton plantations based on enslaved African American labor, the term became associated with these conditions. It was generally applied to a much larger agricultural region in the Southern US characterized by a history of cotton plantation agriculture in the 19th century and a high percentage of African Americans outside metropolitan areas. The enslaved peoples were freed after the American Civil War, and many continued to work in agriculture afterward. Their descendants make up much of the African-American population of the United States.
Charles Bruce Catton was an American historian and journalist, known best for his books concerning the American Civil War. Known as a narrative historian, Catton specialized in popular history, featuring interesting characters and historical vignettes, in addition to the basic facts, dates, and analyses. Although his books were researched well and included footnotes, they were not generally presented in a rigorous academic style. He won a Pulitzer Prize during 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia.
David Michael Kennedy is an American historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University and the former Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history.
Edward Paul Jones is an American novelist and short story writer. His 2003 novel The Known World received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large.
Alan Shaw Taylor is an American historian specializing in early United States history. He is the author of a number of books about the colonial history of the United States, the American Revolution and the early American Republic. Since 1995, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes and the Bancroft Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction.
Leon F. Litwack is an American historian whose scholarship focuses on slavery, the Reconstruction Era of the United States, and its aftermath into the 20th century. He won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for History, and the Francis Parkman Prize for his 1979 book Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Don Edward Fehrenbacher was an American historian. He wrote on politics, slavery, and Abraham Lincoln. He won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics, his book about the Dred Scott Decision. In 1977 David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, which he edited and completed, won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1997 he won the Lincoln Prize.
Glenn Frankel is an author, academic and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He worked for many years for The Washington Post, where he was bureau chief in Southern Africa, Jerusalem and London and editor of The Washington Post Sunday magazine. He is the author of four books, the latest of which is High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic, which was published on February 21, 2017. He served as a visiting professor of journalism at Stanford University, and later as director of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and G.B. Dealey Regents Professor in Journalism.
Tommie Shelby is an American philosopher. Since 2013, he has served as the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is particularly known for his work in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, social theory, and the philosophy of social science.
Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist, and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.
The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United States is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by American historian Marcus Lee Hansen (1892-1938). The book covers the social and economic background of emigrant groups to the United States from colonial days to the American Civil War.
Ray Sprigle was a journalist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for his reporting that Hugo Black, newly appointed to the US Supreme Court, had been a member of the 20th-century Ku Klux Klan.
The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People is book about European migrations into the United States by Oscar Handlin. It won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1952.
