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X-Posted from: H-NET List for African History and Culture <H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU> From: "Colleen A. Vasconcellos" <colleen@MAIL.H-NET.MSU.EDU> ---------------- From: Peter Limb [mailto:plimb@mail.h-net.msu.edu] Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 8:10 AM PRESS RELEASE Winner: 2004 CONOVER-PORTER AWARD for AFRICANA BIBLIOGRAPHY OR REFERENCE WORK The Conover-Porter Award is the most prestigious award for published works of bibliography or reference on Africa. The Africana Librarians Council of the African Studies Association (U.S.) awarded the fourteenth biennial Conover-Porter Award during the 2004 annual meeting of the African Studies Association in New Orleans. Winner A.J. Christopher, The Atlas of Changing South Africa. London: Routledge; 2001. Geographer A.J. Christopher's highly important Atlas of Changing South Africa demonstrates great creativity both in assembling spatial data about apartheid South Africa (and the decades before and after) and in showing how such analysis illustrates and elaborates a very wide range of social, political, economic, and cultural questions. His 175 maps, plans, and graphs range from the literally global through regional, national, metropolitan, and urban levels, down to individual house and post office plans, showing both major and petty consequences of apartheid's obsession with segregation. Christopher has compiled, successfully and accessibly, a great amount of information, both visual and textual, essential to almost all South African social, cultural, political, and policy studies. The high quality and the high value of the visual presentation of spatial data are representative of the current resurgence of geospatial analysis. Honorable Mention Books Paul Tigambe Zeleza and Dickson Eyoh, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century African History. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Zeleza and Eyoh have responded to the inescapable problem of surveying a continent by producing a volume whose structure and coherence persuades the reader that their decisions about inclusion, exclusion, and word counts were made according to a well-thought-out and well-executed plan. Also, by limiting the work to the twentieth century, the authors had a logical but not impossibly large period to cover, unlike many other continent-wide works. The roughly 120 editors and contributors of the signed articles are notable for not only being recognized scholars of their subjects, but are themselves to a very large extent Africans, whether Africans working in Western or African universities. The five sizes of entries, from 600 to 4,000 words, were assigned by an explicit hierarchy of complexity, avoiding the questions one too often has about "why this topic, and not another". Any one-volume work must be a gateway to more extensive coverage elsewhere; this one is unusually well built and sturdy. Toyin Falola, Key Events in African History: A Reference Guide. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Falola found a novel solution to the problem of covering vast topics in a single volume--in his case, all history of all Africa. His subtitle is appropriate. Rather than writing an encyclopedia, a dictionary, or a single narrative, Falola has produced 36 chapters on what he considers "key" events. Twelve of these are from "ancient and precolonial" times, six events are from the 19th century, and the remaining half from the 20th century. Examples are "the Iron Age and the Spread of Bantu Speakers," "the Outbreak of Islamic Jihad, 1804," and "Coups, Counter Coups, and Military Regimes, 1963 Onward." A subject index, detailed time line, and suggested readings for each chapter enhance the book's value. Falola has achieved the rare result, a reference book that could serve as a textbook--especially for a seminar whose members each built on one chapter or another. About the Conover-Porter Award Helen Conover was senior bibliographer, African Section of the Library of Congress, serving 32 years before her retirement in 1963. Dorothy Porter Wesley was librarian of the Moorland-Springarn Research Center, Howard University, retiring in 1973 after 45 years of service. Nominations for the 2006 Conover-Porter Award will be announced in July 2005. For further information please contact: Peter Limb, Africana Bibliographer, Michigan State University, 100 Library East Lansing, MI, 48824-1048 USA: phone: (517) 432-6123 extension 239; fax: (517) 432-3532; email: limb@msu.edu The Africana Librarians Council of the African Studies Association (U.S.) 24 June, 2005
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