Lizabeth Cohen Awarded Bancroft Prize

The urban historian is honored—for the second time.

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.

Read more articles by: John S. Rosenberg

You might also like

Reparations as Public Health

A Harvard forum on the racial health gap

Unionizing Harvard Academic Workers

Pay, child care, workplace protections at issue 

Should AI Be Scaled Down?

The case for maximizing AI models’ efficiency—not size

Most popular

AWOL from Academics

Behind students' increasing pull toward extracurriculars

Why Americans Love to Hate Harvard

The president emeritus on elite universities’ academic accomplishments—and a rising tide of antagonism

The Broken Social Contract

Danielle Allen on America’s broken social contract

More to explore

Darker Days

The current disquiets compared to Harvard’s Vietnam-era traumas

Making Space

The natural history of Junko Yamamoto’s art and architecture

Spellbound on Stage

Actor and young adult novelist Aislinn Brophy