Dorothy Schwieder Prize

Dorothy Schwieder Prize Submission 2023 Form

Dorothy Schwieder Prize is awarded annually for the best article on Midwestern history published during the previous calendar year. Schwieder was the first female professor of history at Iowa State University and the author of numerous books about Iowa, including Iowa: The Middle Land (1996). All articles on Midwestern history that were published in peer-reviewed journals are eligible for the prize.

The winner of the 2023 Dorothy Schwieder Prize is Robert Lee for “‘A Better View of the Country’: A Missouri Settlement Map by William Clark," William and Mary Quarterly 79, no. 1 (January 2022): 89-120.

The Schwieder Prize committee reported a remarkable set of submissions to review and said the selection required multiple close readings. According to the committee, Lee’s essay placed Missouri at the center of national expansion and Clark at the pen of manipulation of treaties that had international consequences for Indian nations and for the nations from which immigrants flowed into millions of acres of US public lands. Lee takes historians to task for not paying closer attention to this historic evidence (and conveys a cautionary tale to public repositories to avoid uncritical attribution—in this case, dating the map to 1808— which clearly dissuaded closer scrutiny).

The committee extended an Honorable Mention to Ashley Howard for “Whose Streets: Wielding Urban Revolts as Political Tools,” Journal of African American History 107:2 (Spring 2022): 238–65. Howard’s essay argues that uprisings in cities such as those at Milwaukee and Cincinnati during 1967 indicated a shift in Black Freedom Movement tactics away from middle-class sensibilities and toward working-class direct action against “the state” that had responded (but not adequately) to middle-class goals. Howard articulates this through comparisons between the two cities. As Howard explains, “Thus, while the national Civil Rights Movement could claim major victories like the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, working-class African Americans in cities like Milwaukee and Cincinnati found themselves in increasingly dire straits, with little political recourse.”

Past Prize Recipient

2021 Recipient: John William Nelson, “Sigenauk’s War of Independence: Anishinaabe Resurgence and the Making of Indigenous Authority in the Borderlands of Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly 78, no. 4 (October 2021): 653-86.

The Dorothy Schwieder Prize for Best Article goes to John William Nelson for "Sigenauk’s War of Independence: Anishinaabe Resurgence and the Making of Indigenous Authority in the Borderlands of Revolution." Nelson found that during the upheaval of the American Revolution, Indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes harnessed the uncertain geopolitics of the era to advance their own objectives in the region. Sigenauk, a leader from the Anishinaabe towns southwest of Lake Michigan, navigated these changing dynamics to defend and expand his faction’s autonomy while simultaneously enhancing his individual influence in the wider borderland. Nelson revealed how Sigenauk’s rise to prominence the ability of Indigenous leaders to weave traditional expectations with new innovations to navigate new conflicts of the revolutionary era. Sigenauk ably dealt with both internal Anishinaabewaki and external revolutionary borderlands and their complexities to grow his faction’s power in the region. Sigenauk’s story and the focus on the southwestern Anishinaabeg challenges scholarly assertions that the American Revolution was an era of decline for Indigenous peoples.

Photo by Paul D. Sorensen on Flickr