Congratulations to Allison Bigelow, who has just received the 2021 James A. Rawley Prize for Atlantic History from the American Historical Association. Allison's book, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture for the University of North Carolina Press, 2020), is the first monographic study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that Indigenous, African diasporic, South Asian, and European miners and metallurgists developed as they extracted and refined the metals that shaped the history of racial capitalism and globalization. The book draws together methods of visual, material cultural, and historical linguistic analysis to shed new light on the materiality of language, the connections between colonial science and society, and the understudied intellectual contributions of Indigenous, African, and South Asian mining women and men. You can learn more about the book here (YouTube link, rocking that no-childcare life during COVID), and you can purchase Mining Language from any of the BIPOC-owned bookstores on the department list of resources.
This is the 23rd year of the Rawley award, and the first time that the prize has gone to a scholar in Spanish. For a list of all recipients of the 2021 AHA book awards, please click here.