Tales of Early America

History professors shed new light on country’s formative years

Pulitzer Prize

One of the University of Virginia’s newest faculty members, historian Alan Taylor, has received a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832.

Taylor, one of the nation’s premier experts on Colonial America and the early U.S. republic, came to UVA in March after two decades at the University of California, Davis, and will begin teaching in August. He received his first Pulitzer in 1996 for his book William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic.

The Internal Enemy tells the story of about 3,000 enslaved Africans who joined British forces to fight against the United States during the War of 1812. “The book sets that story in the context of the shifting nature of slavery after the American Revolution,” Taylor says. “It was an extraordinary set of human dramas, the resourcefulness of people who were seeking freedom, stealing boats in the middle of the night to go out and find British warships and offer their services.”

Other Pulitzer Winners with University Ties

Virginius Dabney (Col ’20, Grad ’21)
1948 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch

Karl Shapiro (Attended ’32)
1945 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for V-Letter and Other Poems

N. Scott Momaday (Law ’59)
1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for House Made of Dawn

Henry S. Taylor (Col ’65)
1986 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for The Flying Change

George P. Rodrigue III (Col ’78)
1986 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in the Dallas Morning News, for an investigation into subsidized housing in East Texas

1994 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in the Dallas Morning News, for a series examining international violence against women

Claudia Emerson (Col ’79)
2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Late Wife

Michael Vitez (Col ’79)
1997 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism, for the “Final Choices” series in the Philadelphia Inquirer

Edward P. Jones (Grad ’81)
2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Known World

Ron Suskind (Col ’81)
1995 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, for the Wall Street Journal series on inner-city honors students in Washington, D.C.

David R. Hertz (Col ’83)
1994 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism in the Akron Beacon Journal, for a series examining local racial attitudes

Lane DeGregory (Col ’89, Grad ’95)
2009 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, for “The Girl in the Window” in the St. Petersburg Times

Douglas Blackmon (Faculty)
2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Rita Dove (Faculty)
1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Thomas and Beulah

William Faulkner (Faculty)
1955 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for A Fable
1963 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Reivers

Dumas Malone (Faculty)
1975 Pulitzer Prize for History, for his six-volume biography Jefferson and His Time

Peter Taylor (Faculty)
1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for A Summons to Memphis

Charles Wright (Faculty)
1998 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Black Zodiac

American History Book Prize

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, a UVA history professor with both U.S. and British citizenship, has dispelled commonly held misperceptions about the Revolutionary War in his book The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire. The winner of the New-York Historical Society’s annual American History Book Prize, O’Shaughnessy’s book challenges the theory that incompetent British military commanders and political leaders were to blame for Britain’s defeat during the American Revolution.

“These were people of substance,” O’Shaughnessy says of the British leaders. “They were worthy adversaries. The popular history, that they were aristocrats given to buffoonery, diminishes the American achievement.”

“The book reminds us that it is too easy for the victors to dismiss the past’s losers as stupid or contemptible,” says Paul Halliday, who chairs UVA’s history department. “With quiet good sense and analytic generosity, O’Shaughnessy reminds us that ‘not so fast’ is not only an injunction to careful intellectual work but it also amounts to an ethical obligation we all owe to the people of the past.”