University News | March 18, 2020

Lizabeth Cohen Bancroft Prize

The urban historian is honored—for the second time.

by John S. Rosenberg

photograph of Lizabeth Cohen — Lizabeth Cohen
Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Public Affairs and Communications

Urban historian Lizabeth Cohen—the Jones professor of American studies and past dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—has been awarded the 2020 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, the highest academic honor for American historians. She was recognized for her book, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, a deep analysis of urban renewal in Boston, New Haven, and New York, focused on the career of the little-studied leader of the movement in those cities. Read the Harvard Magazine review here.

Remarkably, this is Cohen’s second Bancroft: she was also honored in 1991 for her first book, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939.

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