Ernest Freeberg, Lindsay Young Professor and associate head of the History Department, was recently named winner of the 2010 Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award. The award, presented by the Intellectual Freedom Round Table of the American Library Association, is for Freeberg’s second book, Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent. The book tells the remarkable story of the imprisonment of Eugene Debs, perennial Socialist candidate for the US presidency, for his public criticism of the US’s involvement in WWI. It is also the story of the broad coalition of Americans who voted for him while he was imprisoned and fought for his release. In 2009, the book won the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.
This year, Freeberg has held a Dibner Research Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology from the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and a Library Research Fellowship from the Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware. He is currently writing a book on the cultural history of electric light, which will be published by Penguin.
Selected Publications
Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (Harvard University Press, 2008).
The Education of Laura Bridgman, First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language (Harvard University Press, 2001).
“The Meanings of Blindness in 19th Century America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Fall 2002.
Visit the Quest Gallery at Trace, UT’s digital archive, to access publications of other Quest Scholars of the Week.