Professor Barbara D. Savage has won this year's Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians, "Recognizing the best book in African American women’s and gender history." She won the award for her book Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (Yale University Press) and OAH had the following to say:
"Barbara Savage’s powerful biography of Merze Tate (1905–1996), a trailblazing Black woman scholar and intrepid world traveler, eloquently honors an extraordinary figure whose contributions to U.S. intellectual and political history have too long been overlooked. Through more than a decade of meticulous research and a compelling narrative, Savage presents Tate’s remarkable journey as the first African American woman to attend the University of Oxford and earn a Ph.D. from Radcliffe College. Tate overcame racial and gender barriers in academia and international diplomacy in her career as a scholar, educator, and peace advocate. The bold and irrepressible Tate refused to limit her intellectual ambitions in a Jim and Jane Crow world. Savage lucidly and skillfully renders Tate’s life as a global traveler and her career as a diplomatic scholar, illuminating for readers a cosmopolitan intellectual whose scholarship in international relations and peace studies broke new ground. This biography helps address a crucial void in historical scholarship and offers a model for writing Black women’s biography. It reframes the narrative on the contributions of African American women to the intellectual and cultural fabric of the twentieth century and challenges provincial approaches to African American and U.S. history, women’s history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought."
See the official announcement in the publication below.