Jacobs earns history fellowship

jbrehm2, March 2, 2012 | View original publication

Jacobs earns history fellowship

Margaret Jacobs, Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has been awarded a highly competitive fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The fellowship will support her latest book project, which continues a line of research that in 2010 helped her win a top honor in her field.

            Jacobs' latest project explores the history of the fostering and adoption of American Indian children within non-Indian families. She intends to use her yearlong fellowship, which starts Aug. 15, to write the book manuscript. The project will significantly contribute to studies of American Indian history, gender history, family history, studies of colonialism, and American and world history overall.

            "Such a study will expose a troubling episode of post-World War II American history that is little known outside American Indian communities but is crucial to understanding contemporary American society and its racial politics," Jacobs said in her fellowship proposal.

            Jacobs explored similar themes for an earlier era in her 2010 Bancroft Prize-winning book, "White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940." The Bancroft Prize, bestowed annually by the trustees of Columbia University, is considered among the highest honors in American history writing.

            ACLS awarded just 65 fellowships. Recipients were selected from 1,191 eligible applications.

            ACLS is a private, nonprofit federation of 71 national scholarly organizations. It is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. Advancing scholarship by awarding fellowships as well as strengthening relations among the national scholarly organizations devoted to such studies is central to the group's work, according to the group's website.