The WHA announces the David J. Weber Prize given annually for the best non-fiction book on Southwestern America. The competition will be open to any non-fiction book, including biography, on any aspect of Southwestern life, past or present with a 2022 copyright. The purpose of the prize is to promote fine writing and original research on the American Southwest. The author will receive $2500 and an invitation to give the annual David J. Weber Prize Lecture at Southern Methodist University.
-2023 Awards Cycle opens January 25, 2023
-2023 Award Submission (Postmark) Deadline: April 15, 2023
The WHA office sends award notifications in August. View past recipients.
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In 2011, the Western History Association Council and the Clements Center agreed to sponsor a new book prize to be administered by the WHA. The David J. Weber-Clements Prize for the Best Non-Fiction Book on Southwestern America was presented for the first time at the 2012 WHA conference. The prize originated as the William P. Clements Prize for the Best Non-Fiction Book on Southwestern America, where it has been awarded by the Center since 1999. William P. Clements, Jr., who passed away in May 2011, was the Governor of Texas and the founding benefactor of the Center. The prize honored both Governor Clements and the Center's Founding Director and past WHA President, David J. Weber, who passed away in August 2010.
The award was renamed in November 2020 in honor of the Center's Founding Director and past WHA President David J. Weber.
2022 | Paul Barba, Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands (University of Nebraska Press, 2021)
2021 | Jennifer Holland, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (University of California Press, 2020)2020 | Maurice Crandall, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598-1912 (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)
2019 | Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, Hopi Runners: Crossing the Terrain between Indian and American (University Press of Kansas, 2018)
2018 | Julian Lim for Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2017)
2017 | David Wallace Adams for Three Roads to Magdalena: Coming of Age in a Southwest Borderland, 1890-1990 (University Press of Kansas, 2016)
2016 | Andrew Torget for Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (University of North Carolina Press)
2015 | Andrew Needham for Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton University Press, 2014)
2014 | John L. Kessell for Miera y Pacheco: A Renaissance Spaniard in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013)
2013 | Lance R. Blyth for Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
2012 | William deBuys for A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (Oxford University Press, 2013)