At this weekend's annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Louisville, Susan Youngblood Ashmore's CARRY IT ON was announced as the winner of two significant southern history prizes.The Southern Historical Association's Francis B. Simkins Award recognizes the best first book by an author in the field of southern history over a two-year period.
The Southern Association of Women Historians' Willie Lee Rose Prize is awarded annually for the best monograph in southern history authored by a woman. In their award letter, the prize committee commended Ashmore for her impressive and exhaustive research as well as her efforts to "foreground black agency and trace continuities from the civil rights movement to the war on poverty--topics that historians have tended to separate far too much."The Journal of American History review of the book captured its remarkable qualities this way: "A brief review cannot do justice to Ashmore's skill in weaving together the economic and political aspects of a still-unfinished effort to remake Alabama along more just and egalitarian lines. Her book, like Kent Germany's New Orleans after the Promises (2007), signals a new level of breadth and sophistication in civil rights scholarship."
