“What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance,” wrote the English surrealist poet David Gascoyne during World War II. Existentialism, which began with phenomenology prior to World War I and came of age during the Second World War, arose in an era of “extreme ideology and extreme suffering” notes Sarah Bakewell in her excellent 2016 intellectual history of the movement, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom Being and Apricot Cocktails.

Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and numerous others sought a new way forward amidst a generation besot by industrialized total war. Though wide differences existed between each in terms of philosophical thought and beliefs, in general they all embraced the idea of authenticity and personal agency.  Survival in this new age depended on one’s ability to “decide to live” to engage the issues of the time; a philosophical system “designed for a species that had just scared the hell out of itself, but that finally felt ready to grow up and take responsibility,” writes Bakewell.

Well, most of us don’t live in Occupied Paris, the Pacific Theater, or the Russian Front, but needless to say, several aspects of this era seem to be reappearing and millions of people around the world do live under such distress: see Syria and Myanmar for just two examples. So at first blush, our announcements regarding the UHA awards might feel slight, yet, in our own way as historians, we aspire to the same kind of engagement and authenticity that Camus, Beauvoir, and Sartre all attempted.

Camus, pictured above receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, bickered with Beauvoir and Sartre about how to move forward. In novels like The Plague and treaties like The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus put forth the idea that life and the impersonal systems we all toiled under were absurd, however, it was up to us to determine how and why we endured. “We must decide whether to give up or keep going,” Bakewell summarizes. Heroism, as depicted by the protagonist of The Plague, was not about winning or losing but rather about enduring for a purpose even in the face of limitless odds. Despite differences, Sartre and Beauvoir came to a similar conclusion: “the art of life lies in getting things done.”

Sometimes the fetid residue of social media can be distressing, even oppressive. However, this only adds value to the work done by UHA members. Every article, book, and dissertation produced is an effort to push through this post-truth age of political discourse; a grappling with who we are and an expression of a writer’s belief system even when submerged beneath historical detail. History’s importance, be it for national debates or identity, has rarely been greater. In our role as historians, we search for evidence, craft narratives, and assert arguments as both an expression of our authentic selves and as a means to get closer to establishing the truth about our ocean of municipal, state, and national history. After all, to quote David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: “My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”  It’s our ocean, drop your knowledge into it, watch the multiplicity of historical waves roll in and let us celebrate your contribution to the rising tide of truth.

Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book in North American Urban History in 2017

The UHA will award a prize of $500 for the best monograph in North American urban history with a copyright date of 2017. To be considered, please submit three (3) copies of the book, each containing a complete publication citation. All materials must be received by May 1, 2018.

Submit one book directly to each member of the Jackson Award committee:

Margaret Garb
Washington University in St. Louis
Campus Box 1062
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Paul Gleye
Department of Architecture & Landscape Architecture
North Dakota State University
650 NP Avenue
Fargo, ND 58102

Monica Perales
Department of History
University of Houston
3553 Cullen Boulevard – Agnes Arnold Hall Room 524
Houston, TX 77204-3003

Criteria for selection for all awards: significance, originality, quality of research, sophistication of methodology, clarity of presentation, cogency of arguments, and contribution to the field of urban history. Membership in the UHA is not required. All works must be in English or in English translation. Late or incomplete submissions cannot be considered. Submissions will be considered incomplete unless a copy of the book is received by each of the three (3) award committee members by the deadline. Submissions must be accompanied by a single page providing the author’s current address, e-mail, and telephone number(s). Letters of recommendation and endorsement are discouraged. The winner will be announced in late summer 2017, with formal presentation of the award at the UHA biennial conference in Columbia, South Carolina, on October 18-21, 2018. The Urban History Association reserves the right not to award this prize.

Arnold Hirsch Award for Best Article in Urban History published in a scholarly journal in 2017 (no geographic restriction)

The UHA will award a prize of $250 for the best article on urban history published in a scholarly journal with a publication date of 2017 (either in print or online as part of a journal’s early online version). To be considered, please submit three (3) copies of the article, each containing a complete publication citation. All materials must be received by May 1, 2018.

Articles must be submitted by email as attachments in PDF format. Submit one copy of the article directly to each member of the Hirsch Award committee:

Brodwyn Fischer
University of Chicago
Email: bmf@uchicago.edu

Lionel Frost
Monash University (Australia)
Email: lionel.frost@monash.edu

Benjamin Looker
Saint Louis University
Email: ben.looker@slu.edu

Criteria for selection for all awards: significance, originality, quality of research, sophistication of methodology, clarity of presentation, cogency of arguments, and contribution to the field of urban history. Membership in the UHA is not required. All works must be in English or in English translation. Late or incomplete submissions cannot be considered. Submissions will be considered incomplete unless a copy of the article is received by each of the three (3) award committee members by the deadline. Submissions must be accompanied by a single page providing the author’s current address, e-mail, and telephone number(s). Letters of recommendation and endorsement are discouraged. The winner will be announced in late summer 2017, with formal presentation of the award at the UHA biennial conference in Columbia, South Carolina, on October 18-21, 2018. The Urban History Association reserves the right not to award this prize.

Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History completed in 2017 (no geographic restriction)

The UHA will award a prize of $350 for the best dissertation in urban history with a completion date in 2017. To be considered, please submit three (3) copies of the dissertation, each containing information on where and when completed. All materials must be received by May 1, 2018.

Dissertations must be submitted by email as attachments in PDF format. Submit one copy of the dissertation directly to each member of the Katz Award committee:

Andrew Diamond
Sorbonne Université
Email: andrew.j.diamond@gmail.com

Lily Geismer
Claremont McKenna University
Email: Lily.Geismer@claremontmckenna.edu

Jim Wunsch
SUNY Empire State College
Email: muel1984@gmail.com

Criteria for selection for all awards: significance, originality, quality of research, sophistication of methodology, clarity of presentation, cogency of arguments, and contribution to the field of urban history. Membership in the UHA is not required. All works must be in English or in English translation. Late or incomplete submissions cannot be considered. Submissions will be considered incomplete unless a copy of the dissertation is received by each of the three (3) award committee members by the deadline. Submissions must be accompanied by a single page providing the author’s current address, e-mail, and telephone number(s). Letters of recommendation and endorsement are discouraged. The winner will be announced in late summer 2017, with formal presentation of the award at the UHA biennial conference in Columbia, South Carolina, on October 18-21, 2018. The Urban History Association reserves the right not to award this prize.

Featured image: Camus wins Nobel Prize, October 17, 1957, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

By Adam Arenson 

Adam Arenson. 2018. Banking on Beauty: Millard Sheets and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California. Austin: University of Texas Press, 368 pp. 157 color and 17 b&w photos. ISBN: 978-1-4773-1529-3 $45. Hardcover.

“I want buildings that will be exciting seventy-five years from now,” financier Howard Ahmanson told visual artist Millard Sheets, offering him complete control of design, subject, decoration, and budget for his Home Savings and Loan branch offices.

The partnership between Home Savings — for decades, the nation’s largest savings and loan — and the Millard Sheets Studio produced more than 160 buildings in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri between 1953 and 1991. Adorned with murals, mosaics, stained glass, and sculptures, the Home Savings (and Savings of America) branches displayed a celebratory vision of community history and community values that garnered widespread acclaim.

Banking on Beauty presents the first history of this remarkable building program, . drawing extensively on archival materials, site visits, and more than seventy oral history interviews with artists, Home Savings executives, employees, community members, and preservationists. Arenson completed the first thorough examination of the Smithsonian’s Millard Sheets Papers at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and the sketches, installation slides, project files, correspondence, and other materials in the Denis O’Connor Collection at the Huntington Library.

Banking on Beauty begins with architectural and commercial precedents for such works, including California world fairs and Rockefeller Center, and continues past the sale of Home Savings to Washington Mutual in 1998, and the seizure of WaMu in 2008, to explore the preservation challenges for this work today. The book tells a fascinating story of how the architecture and art were created, the politics of where the branches were built, and why the Sheets Studio switched from portraying universal family scenes to celebrating local history amid the dramatic cultural and political changes of the 1960s.

Combining urban history, business history, and art and architectural history, Banking on Beauty reveals how these institutions shaped the corporate and cultural landscapes of Southern California, where many of the branches were located. Richly illustrated and beautifully written, Banking on Beauty builds a convincing case for preserving these outstanding examples of Midcentury Modern architecture, which currently face an uncertain future.

Banking on Beauty is available February 1, 2018, but is available for pre-order now. 

Image at top: Mural “The Arts,” by Millard Owen Sheets at the Department of Interior Building, Washington, D.C., Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, 2011, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress 

California native Adam Arenson is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Urban Studies Program at Manhattan College. He has written or coedited three other books on the history of the American West and the politics and culture of U.S. cities: the award-winning The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Harvard, 2011; Missouri, 2015 paperback); Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (California, 2015); and Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire (Penn, 2013). A graduate of Harvard and Yale, he has also written about history in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other venues. More information about this and other publications available at adamarenson.com. 

The Vernacular Architecture Forum invites urban historians — students, faculty of any rank, independent scholars, public historians — to apply for the third round of its Access Award. The award supports attendance at the group’s annual meeting — including two full days of tours and one day of paper sessions — no strings attached, for individuals who have had limited formal exposure to the disciplines of architectural history and vernacular studies, and  have never attended a VAF meeting. The conference, working with the theme of  A Shared Heritage: Urban and Rural Experience on the Banks of the Potomac, will take place in and around Alexandria, Virginia, May 2-5. For more on the award see vafweb.org/Access-Award and on the conference vafweb.org/Potomac-2018. The deadline for applications if February 1. Read about the experience of one last year’s winners, Emmanuel Falguières, a PhD candidate in history at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) – Paris, here: http://www.vafweb.org/VAN-Summer-2017/4936220.

Also don’t forget about the VAF’s Bishir Prize:

The Bishir Prize, named for longtime member and influential scholar Catherine W. Bishir, is awarded annually to the scholarly article from a juried North American publication that has made the most significant contribution to the study of vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes. In judging the nominated articles, the jurors look for an article that is based on primary research, that breaks new ground in interpretation or methodology, and that contributes generally to the intellectual vitality of vernacular studies. Entries may come from any discipline concerned with vernacular architecture studies. Articles published in the two years prior to the VAF annual conference are eligible for consideration. Please note that essays published as chapters in a book are also eligible if the volume is peer-reviewed, published within the time parameters specified, and the research presented in the essay is new. Anthologized collections are not eligible. The Bishir Prize was awarded for the first time in 2012.

Call for Nominations: 2018 Bishir Prize 

The Bishir Prize is awarded annually to the scholarly article from a juried North American publication that has made the most significant contribution to the study of vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes. Work published as a chapter in a book is eligible along with journal articles. Nominations should be based on primary research, break significant new ground in interpretation or methodology, and contribute to the intellectual vitality of vernacular studies. Entries may come from any discipline concerned with investigating vernacular architecture/landscape. Nominated pieces must bear the publication imprint of 2016 or 2017.

Deadline for submission is 1 February 2018. Send an electronic copy of the work to the prize committee: Elizabeth Collins Cromley (e.c.cromley@gmail.com), Joseph Sciorra (joseph.sciorra@qc.cuny.edu), and Richard Longstreth, chair (rwl@gwu.edu). Please provide the author’s contact information along with your own. Note that the committee automatically considered all refereed articles appearing in the VAF’s journal, Buildings + Landscapes.

The prize winner and nominator will be notified in early March. The award will be presented at the Vernacular Architecture Forum annual meeting in early May.

To nominate an article please submit the following:

• MS Word document providing contact information, publication data (name of book publishing company or title of journal, and date of publication), and a brief statement contextualizing the author(s) and article.
• PDF copy of the article.

2018 Bishir Prize Committee

Richard Longstreth, chair

Joseph Sciorra

Betsy Cromley