2010 G. Wesley Johnson Award
To my complete astonishment I learned last week that I have been awarded the G. Wesley Johnson Award by the United States National Council on Public History for the best article in The Public Historian for 2010. My award-winning article is available here (and through JSTOR).
Of course the bigger question is now that I’m a policy-maker myself am I acting on my own recommendations? And if not, why not?
Here’s the abstract:
In 2002 the History and Policy network was set up in the UK in order to connect British historians with policymakers and “increase the influence of historical research over current policy.” At the same time a reverse process can be observed in France, where since 2005 historians have been campaigning against certain uses of history by politicians. This article compares the two trends, arguing that the French example demonstrates the need to pay as much attention to raising awareness of history as a practice as to transmitting content, if historians are to contribute usefully to public policy debates.
And who was G. Wesley Johnson? Can’t find any online clues so grateful for any enlightenment. The historian in me wants to know!
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Dr. G. Wesley Johnson earned degrees in history from Harvard and Yale. He taught colonial and precolonial West African History at the Santa Barbara Division of the University of California (UCSB), specializing in French colonial rule, especially in Senegal. (He was a member of my dissertation committee.) He enjoyed a lasting friendship with the late President Leopold Senghor. At UCSB, he also introduced and taught Public History. Later he accepted a post in history at Brigham Young University. I last communicated with him in the mid-1990s.
Joseph
Many thanks for this reply. I feel very honoured by the award in his memory.
Kind regards.
Wes and I were friends when I was at Stanford Law School 63-66. I last saw him in 2010 in Provo. jpkennedy