2006 Recipient for the Allen Noble Book Award
The Scrapbook in American Life , edited by Susan Tucker, Catherine Ott, and Patricia Buckler, published by Temple University Press, 2006.
Susan Tucker is Curator of Books and Records at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women at thor of Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers in the Segregated South . Katherine Ott is Curator in the Division of Science and Medicine at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and author of Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 . Patricia P. Buckler is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University Northwest and author of five articles on scrapbooks. Buckler is a contributor to the book American Icons and a 2001 Mellon Research Fellow in early American history and culture.
"Keeping a scrapbook" is a longstanding American tradition. The collections of fragments that often b t their bindings make scrapbooks a pleasurable feast for both makers and consumers. They are a material manifestation of memory—of the compilers and of the cultural moment in which they were created. Despite the widespread popularity of scrapbooks, historians have rarely examined them in a systematic way. In this fascinating work, fourteen contributors offer the first serious, sustained examination and analysis of scrapbooks. While other books offer suggestions on how to create scrapbooks, this book looks at their significance. The editors observe that scrapbooks are one of the most mysterious objects to be found in a family home. This unique book helps to explain the mystery. It will appeal to all readers with an interest in "scrapbooking" as well as to scholars who study American culture and print, visual, or material culture.
2005 Recipient:
Steven Conn and Max Page
The Allen Noble Book Award, is given in honor of the scholarship he contributed to cultural geography. The award recognizes the best-edited book in the field of North American material culture. As a long-time scholar and professor emeritus of geography and planning at the University of Akron, Dr. Noble is recognized for his influential and seminal work.
The Noble Award is being presented this year to Building the Nation: Americans Write About Their Architecture, Their Cities and Their Landscape. It is edited by Steven Conn and Max Page and published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (2003). Compiled around eight themes which reflect the interaction between humans as they create the built environment, and the built environment as a formative force on human social and cultural values, each chapter is a collection of ideas, thoughts, meditations and essays on historically reoccurring themes such as “what is American architecture?”, or “shaping nature the American way.”
The selected authors for each chapter provide expert writings on the themes from the nation’s founding to contemporary times. The book provides a thought provoking way to compare and contrast ideas about our human geography through topical issues over time, persistence and change, and exemplifies the work of Allen Noble.
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The
Pioneer America Society seeks to encourage and recognize
books by authors regarding material culture in North America.
Named for the renowned geographer, Allen G. Noble, the
prize in his honor is granted annually for the best-edited
book in the field published within two years of the award.