Center for Presidential History Book Prize

Announcing the winner of the 2024 CPH Book Prize:

Congratulations to Sheyda Jahanbani and her book 
The Poverty of the World: Rediscovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1947-1968 (Oxford University Press)

The CPH Book Prize committee was unanimous in their praise for Jahanbani's work, calling it "innovative," "an historiographical and methodological triumph," and a new "standard volume in 20th century history." It draws together intellectual history and the histories of U.S. foreign relations and domestic politics to explain how and why mid-century Americans focused on poverty as a global problem to solve, and then brought those ideas back home. Oxford UP's description is right: the book "sheds new light on the domestic impacts of the Cold War, the global ambitions of American liberalism, and the way in which key intellectuals and policymakers worked to develop an alternative vision of US empire in the decades after World War II."

The CPH Book Prize is awarded annually for a distinguished first book published in English, in any aspect in the field of United States presidential history, broadly defined. Dr. Jahanbani will receive a $2,500 prize and an invitation to deliver the annual CPH Book Prize Lecture at Southern Methodist University in the Spring of 2025.