Frankfort, Ky. --- Dr. John David Smith is this year’s winner of the Kentucky Historical Society’s Richard H. Collins Award. This award is given annually to the author of the article in The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society judged by an outside panel of scholars to have made the most outstanding contribution to the history of the commonwealth. Collins Award winners receive a plaque and a $1,000 prize.
“I am honored and gratified to receive this award. I consider it among my most significant accolades,” says Dr. Smith. “It means all the more to me because of my affection for the Commonwealth and my many dear friends who reside there.”
Smith’s article was “‘To hue the line and let the chips fall where they may’: J. Winston Coleman’s Slavery Times in Kentucky Reconsidered,” which appeared in the Autumn 2005 issue of The Register. “I became intrigued by Coleman as a graduate student at the University of Kentucky. I knew then that I wanted to study his book in-depth and started collecting materials back then, in the mid-1970s,” says Dr. Smith. “Over time I amassed a large corpus of information on Coleman and he and his book were never too far removed from my other work on the historiography of slavery.”
Smith, who was a previous Collins Award winner in 1988, received his Ph.D. in southern history from the University of Kentucky in 1977 and currently is the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He also has three books in progress: a history of Radical Reconstruction, a history of the slave-reparations movement, and an intellectual history of trans-Atlantic racial reform at the fin de siecle.
The award is named for Richard H. Collins, one of the pioneers of Kentucky history, and best known for his 1874 Historical Sketches of Kentucky. Previous winners have included Thomas D. Clark, Lowell H. Harrison, Robert M. Ireland, and Charles P. Roland. Published since 1903, The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society is among the oldest historical journals in the country and is a benefit of membership in the Kentucky Historical Society.
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An agency of the Kentucky Commerce Cabinet, the Kentucky Historical Society, since 1836, has provided connections to the past, perspective on the present and inspiration for the future. KHS operates the Old State Capitol, the Kentucky Military History Museum, and its headquarters, the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History. Since 1999, the thirty-million-dollar Center has welcomed more than one million visitors. For more information about the Kentucky Historical Society and its programs, visit the Web at http://history.ky.gov.