Harvard University’s Lizabeth Cohen Wins the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy

Lizabeth Cohen, the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies at Harvard University and former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has won the Bancroft Prize in American history and diplomacy. The 2020 honor is for her book Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,2019).

The book probes the life of Yale-educated lawyer Ed Logue, whose career as a city planner helped reshape and revive a number of declining American cities, including Boston, New Haven, and New York, in the decades after World War II. The prize committee stated that “Cohen provides a nuanced view of federally funded urban redevelopment and of one of its major practitioners that goes beyond the simplicity of good and bad, heroes and villains.”

Bancroft winners are judged by the “scope, significance, depth of research, and richness of interpretation they present in the areas of American history and diplomacy,” according to a statement by Columbia University, which administers the prize.

Earlier books authors by Professor Cohen include Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, which also won the Bancroft Prize and A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.

Dr. Cohen is a graduate of Princeton University. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in American history from the University of California, Berkeley.