Fronteras is happy to report that Sam Haynes, Director of the Center of Southwestern Studies at UT Arlington, and two Center Fellows, Paul Conrad of the Department of History, and Christopher Conway of the Department of Modern Languages, have won awards for books they published in 2021 and 2022.
Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas (Basic Books, 2022) by Sam Haynes won the Ramirez Family Award for Best Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters, 2023; Tullis Memorial Award (Best book in any field), Texas State Historical Association, 2023; Kate Broocks Bates Award (Best book pre-1900), Texas State Historical Association, 2023; and the TOMFRA Book Prize, Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Association, 2023. In a review published in Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Dr. Greg Cantrell of Texas Christian University, praised the book for being “deeply researched,” and “gracefully written,” and described it as a “thoughtfully argued masterpiece.” Texas Books in Review praised the book as “[A] gripping story, with multiple complicated protagonists, and a framework that makes Mexican, indigenous, and black protagonists key to the origin of Texas.” Foreign Affairs magazine also listed it as one of the best books of 2022. Haynes told Fronteras “It’s no secret that the traditional narrative of the birth of early modern Texas is an Anglocentric one. What I wanted to do in Unsettled Land was tell a very different story, one that examined a multiethnic Texas during this period…”
Dr. Paul Conrad’s The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) has won the 2023 Ray Allen Billington Prize (Organization of American Historians); the 2022 Robert M. Utley Prize (Western History Association); and the 2022 Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá Award (Historical Society of New Mexico). Moreover, Dr. Conrad’s book was a finalist for the 2022 David J. Weber Prize (Western History Association). In an interview with Fronteras, Dr. Conrad explains that his book is about the forced migrations and displacements endured by the Apache. “To understand Apache history requires making sense of how and why those displacements happened” Conrad says, “and what they meant for those sent away from their kin and homeland…Resistance and diaspora went hand in hand.” In praising Dr. Conrad’s book, the Ray Allen Billington Prize committee praised “the empathy with which Conrad treats his Apache subjects, the depth of his research, and his engagement with the work of scholars working on multiple periods and aspects of this history, be that colonialism, Indian slavery, reservations, the establishment of national boundaries, etc.”
Christopher Conway and his coeditor Antoinette Sol received the 2023 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture by the Popular Culture Association for their book The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). Conway and Sol’s book contains chapters by an international roster of scholars about comic book Westerns in Argentina, England, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, Mexico, Poland, and Spain. Chris York, writing in the International Journal of Comic Art writes “Conway and Sol have assembled a rich anthology, a balanced, insightful volume that effectively addresses the global nature of its subject. . . . I suspect comics scholars interested in the Western genre, or in comparative studies in general, will find this a useful resource for years to come.”
