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2025 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award

Unheard Witness foregrounds a young woman’s experience of domestic abuse, resistance, and survival before the mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.

In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband, Charles Whitman, who went on to commit a mass shooting from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Kathy’s writing provides a rare glimpse of how one woman described, and sought to change, her short life with a coercive, controlling, and violent partner.

Unheard Witness provides a portrait of Kathy’s life, doing so at a time when Americans are slowly grasping the link between domestic abuse and mass shootings. Public violence often follows violence in the home, yet such private crimes continue to be treated separately and even erased in the public imagination. Jo Scott-Coe shows how Kathy's letters go against the grain of the official history, which ignored Kathy’s perspective. With its nuanced understanding of abuse and survival, Unheard Witness is an intimate, real-time account of trust and vulnerability—in its own way, a prologue to our age of atrocities.

In the 1910s and 1920s, Black musicians organized more than fifty independent locals within the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) in an attempt to control audition criteria, set competitive wages, and secure a voice in national decision-making. Leta Miller follows the AFM’s history of Black locals, which competed directly with white locals in the same territories, from their origins and successes in the 1920s through Depression-era crises to the fraught process of dismantling segregated AFM organizations in the 1960s and 70s. Like any union, Black AFM locals sought to ensure employment and competitive wages for members with always-evolving solutions to problems. Miller’s account of these efforts includes the voices of the musicians themselves and interviews with former union members who took part in the difficult integration of Black and white locals. She also analyzes the fundamental question of how musicians benefitted from membership in a labor organization.

Broad in scope and rich in detail, Union Divided illuminates the complex working world of unionized Black musicians and the AFM’s journey to racial inclusion.

Nuanced and eye-opening, Union Renegades challenges popular notions of workers attitudes during the Gilded Age.

How a feminist agenda took hold in a male-dominated union.

For more than a quarter century, steel mills in the United States and Canada have produced more than metal: they have produced a new kind of worker and union activist-"Women of Steel." In an era labeled postfeminist and postindustrial, women have created spaces in this quintessentially male-dominated workforce from which to mobilize for their rights as women and workers. In Union Women, Mary Margaret Fonow captures the stories of the women of the United Steelworkers. She focuses on a tenacious group who used their developing power in the union to challenge sex discrimination and to advocate for women’s rights, and applied their transnational resources to construct a feminist response to globalization and economic restructuring. In the process, they have transformed the organizations, resources, and networks of both the labor and women’s movements, and have in turn transformed themselves into feminists.

United States–Latin American Relations, 1850–1903 is a collection of essays that provide an in-depth analysis of the developing relationship between the Americas during the critical period from the Mexican War to the Panama Canal treaty of 1903.

During the second half of the 19th century several forces in the United States, Latin America, and Europe converged to set the stage for the establishment of a more permanent relationship between the United States and Latin America. The key factors--security, economics, and modernization--created both commonalities and conflicts between and among regions. In this volume, scholars examine not only the domestic but also the geopolitical forces that encouraged and guided development of diplomatic relations in this rapidly changing period.

As the contributors note, by the end of the century, economic interests dominated the relationship that eventually developed. This period saw the building of a string of U.S. naval bases in Latin America and the Caribbean, the rapid industrialization of the United States and the development of a substantial export market, the entrance of many U.S. entrepreneurs into Latin American countries, and the first two inter-American conferences. By the century's end, the United States appeared as the dominant partner in the relationship, a perception that earned it the "imperialist" label.

This volume untangles this complex relationship by examining U.S. relations with Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Central America, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay from the perspective of both the United States and the individual Latin American countries.

A companion volume to United States-Latin American Relations, 1800-1850: The Formative Generations, edited by T. Ray Shurbutt, this book establishes a historical perspective crucial to understanding contemporary diplomatic relations.

Winner of the 2017 Bruce Fraser Award from the Association for the Study of Connecticut History
The Library of Congress has designated American Cookery (1796) by Amelia Simmons one of the eighty-eight “Books That Shaped America.” Its recognition as “the first American cookbook” has attracted an enthusiastic modern audience of historians, food journalists, and general readers, yet until now American Cookery has not received the sustained scholarly attention it deserves. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's United Tastes fills this gap by providing a detailed examination of the social circumstances and culinary tradition that produced this American classic.

Situating American Cookery within the post-Revolutionary effort to develop a distinct national identity, Stavely and Fitzgerald demonstrate the book's significance in cultural as well as culinary terms. Ultimately the separation between these categories dissolves as the authors show that the formation of “taste,” in matters of food as well as other material expressions, was essential to building a consensus on what it was to be American. United Tastes explores multiple histories—of food, cookbooks, printing, material and literary culture, and region—to illuminate the meaning and affirm the importance of America's first cookbook.

“A first-person view of submarine under-ice operations that appears in very few other works.”  —Gary E. Weir, author of Rising Tide: The Untold Story of the Russian Submarines that Fought the Cold War 

Unknown Waters tells the story of the brave officers and men of the nuclear attack submarine USS Queenfish (SSN-651), who made the first survey of an extremely important and remote region of the Arctic Ocean. The unpredictability of deep-draft sea ice, shallow water, and possible Soviet discovery, all played a dramatic part in this engrossing 1970 voyage.

Covering 3,100 miles over a period of some 20 days at a laborious average speed of 6.5 knots or less, the attack submarine carefully threaded its way through innumerable underwater canyons of ice and over irregular seafloors, at one point becoming entrapped in an “ice garage.” Only cool thinking and skillful maneuvering of the nearly 5,000-ton vessel enabled a successful exit.

Responding to anti-Indianism in America, the wide-ranging perspectives culled in Unlearning the Language of Conquest present a provocative account of the contemporary hegemony still at work today, whether conscious or unconscious. Four Arrows has gathered a rich collection of voices and topics, including:

• Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson's "Burning Down the House: Laura Ingalls Wilder and American Colonialism," which probes the mentality of hatred woven within the pages of this iconographic children's literature.
• Vine Deloria's "Conquest Masquerading as Law," examining the effect of anti-Indian prejudice on decisions in U.S. federal law.
• David N. Gibb's "The Question of Whitewashing in American History and Social Science," featuring a candid discussion of the spurious relationship between sources of academic funding and the types of research allowed or discouraged.
• Barbara Alice Mann's "Where Are Your Women? Missing in Action," displaying the exclusion of Native American women in curricula that purport to illuminate the history of Indigenous Peoples.

Bringing to light crucial information and perspectives on an aspect of humanity that pervades not only U.S. history but also current sustainability, sociology, and the ability to craft accurate understandings of the population as a whole, Unlearning the Language of Conquest yields a liberating new lexis for realistic dialogues.

A deeply personal memoir that unearths a family history of racism, slaveholding, and trauma as well as love and sparks of delight.

Marcia Herman’s family moved to Birmingham in 1946, when she was five years old, and settled in the steel-making city dense with smog and a rigid apartheid system. Marcia, a shy only child, struggled to fit in and understand this world, shadowed as it was by her mother’s proud antebellum heritage. In 1966, weary of Alabama’s toxic culture, Marcia and her young family left Birmingham and built a life in North Carolina.

Later in life, Herman-Giddens resumed a search to find out what she did not know about her family history. Unloose My Heart interweaves the story of her youth and coming of age in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement together with this quest to understand exactly who and what her maternal ancestors were and her obligations as a white woman within a broader sense of American family.

More than a memoir set against the backdrop of Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle, this is the work of a woman of conscience writing in the twenty-first century. Haunted by the past, Unloose My Heart is a journey of exploration and discovery, full of angst, sorrow, and yearning. Unearthing her forebears’ centuries-long embrace of plantation slavery, Herman-Giddens dug deeply to parse the arrogance and cruelty necessary to be a slaveholder and the trauma and fear that ripple out in its wake. All this forced her to scrutinize the impact of this legacy in her life, as well as her debt to the enslaved people who suffered and were exploited at her ancestors’ hands. But she also discovers lost connections, new cousins and friends, unexpected joys, and, eventually, a measure of peace in the process. With heartbreak, moments of grace, and an enduring sense of love, Unloose My Heart shines a light in the darkness and provides a model for a heartfelt reckoning with American history.
 

Christin L. Hancock looks through the lens of feminist disability to examine the popular but ethically suspect treatment and its consequences. As Hancock shows, the treatment’s purported success rate relied on the disabled minds and bodies of people incarcerated in mental hospitals. The backgrounds and identities of these patients reflected and perpetuated attitudes around poverty, gender, race, and disability while betraying authorities’ desire to protect the public from women and men perceived as abnormal, sexually tainted, and unworthy of community life.

Paying special attention to the patients’ voices and experiences, Unmentionable Madness offers a disability history that confronts the ethics of experimentation.

A novel account of the rise of pictorial naturalism on the eve of the Reformation.

In the summer of 1507, the town of Bern was abuzz with rumors about a sculpture at the Dominican church that had wept tears of blood. But astonishment soon gave way to doubt when a group of local artisans denounced the authenticity of the miracle, complaining that the tears were too poorly made to be the work of a skilled hand, let alone divine intervention. The resulting trial exposed an elaborate fraud staged by the church’s leaders and, with it, a tension that had been building across the region for nearly a century. In a world where claims of sanctity faced judicial scrutiny, the threshold between artistry and deception had become dangerously thin.

Tamara Golan examines how three generations of painters working in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Switzerland navigated this fraught terrain. Golan traces how, amid intensifying skepticism over the authenticity of miracles and visions, these artists forged what she calls an “alternative naturalism,” a conspicuously unnatural mode of painting marked by distorted perspective, unusual modeling, and heavily tooled gold ground. Rather than striving for the faithful transcription of appearances, these artists drew on shared premises of artisanal expertise and juridical inquiry to advance bold claims about the capacity of their craft to represent not just the natural but the supernatural. The first study to identify this body of work as a coherent enterprise, Unnatural Evidence recovers an epistemological experiment at once ambitious and inherently unstable.