Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen honored with prestigious award
Lizabeth Cohen has done it again. For the second time, the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies and former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has won the Bancroft Prize in American history and diplomacy. The 2020 honor is for her book “Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age.” Cohen’s award-winning work, published in October by Farrar, Straus and Giroux,probes the life of Yale-educated lawyer Ed Logue, whose career as a city planner helped reshape and revive a number of declining American cities, including Boston, New Haven, and New York, in decades after World War II. “With this project I set out not just to examine somebody with power in city building, but to bring the categories of analysis that mattered to social history — class, race, occupation, gender — to understanding a person who had great influence,” Cohen told the...