2015 Richard's Prize for best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era for “‘We Do Not Care Particularly About the Skating Rinks’: African Americans Challenges to Racial Discrimination in Places of Public Accommodation in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Massachusetts,” Volume 5, Number 2 (June 2015)
Bergeson-Lockwood’s essay recounts how African Americans in Boston fought discrimination in public accommodations on a variety of fronts, including the press, the courts, and the legislature. The prize committee praised it as “a smart article that ties together legal, political, and social history.” The committee highlighted the article’s unique contribution to scholarship on civil rights by noting, “This work should be useful for anyone interested in the still under-studied question of how ‘race’ worked in the post-Civil War North, what kinds of antiracism were possible, and how and where racial restrictions developed.” Read more about this award...