Updated 29 November 2023
It is not possible yet to nominate books for the 2024 Edelstein Prize. The call for applications will be published early January 2024.
The Edelstein Prize is awarded to the author of an outstanding scholarly book in the history of technology published during the preceding three years (so, books eligible for the 2024 award will have been published in 2021-2023. Non-English language books are eligible for three years following the date of their English translation.
Previously known as the Dexter Prize, the Edelstein Prize was established in 1968 through the generosity of the late Sidney Edelstein, a noted expert on the history of dyes and dye processes, founder of the Dexter Chemical Corporation, and 1988 recipient of SHOT’s Leonardo da Vinci Award. The prize, donated by Ruth Edelstein Barish and her family in memory of Sidney Edelstein and his commitment to excellence in scholarship in the history of technology, consists of an award of $3,500 and a plaque.
Publishers and authors are invited to nominate titles for this prize. To nominate a book, all committee members listed below need to receive a copy of the nominated book before the deadline passes. This book is considered the award for the committee members for their work. After completing the submission you will receive a confirmation e-mail with further instructions and mail addresses of the committee members. Since 2020 you can nominate books via our online submission system, and include an e-copy.
For more information, please contact the SHOT Secretariat, [email protected].
Winner of the 2023 Edelstein Prize Stephan F. Miescher (left) and SHOT President Gabrielle Hecht. (Photo SHOT)
| David C. Brock (2022-2024) – Chair Computer History Museum |
| Maria-Paula Diogo (2023-2025) NOVA School of Science and Technology FCT-NOVA |
| Roger Launius (2021-2023) Launius Historical Services |
| 2023 | Stephan F. Miescher, G: A Dam for Africa: Akosombo Stories from Ghana (Indiana University Press, 2022) |
| 2022 | Sarah A. Seo, G: Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2019) |
| 2021 | Gijs Mom, Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900-1980 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020) |
| 2020 | Due to the Covid-19 situation the 2020 Prize has not been awarded |
| 2019 | Pamela O. Long, Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome(University of Chicago Press, 2018) |
| 2018 | Edward Jones-Imhotep, The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (The MIT Press, 2017) |
| 2017 | William Rankin, After the Map. Cartography, Navigation and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) |
| 2016 | William Boyd, The Slain Wood: Papermaking and its Environmental Consequences in the American South (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) |
| 2015 | Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2014) |
| 2014 | S. Lochlann Jain, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) |
| 2013 | Aileen Fyfe, Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 2012) |
| 2012 | Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011) |
| 2011 | Joy Parr, Sensing Changes:Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 (University of British Columbia Press, 2010) |
| 2010 | Jennifer Karns Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) |
| 2009 | William Kelleher Storey, Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2008) |
| 2008 | Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) |
| 2007 | Gregory Clancey, Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930 (University of California Press, 2006) |
| 2006 | Christine Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) |
| 2005 | Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (MIT Press, 2002) |
| 2004 | Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) |
| 2003 | Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge University Press, 2001) |
| 2002 | Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) |
| 2001 | Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (The MIT Press, 1998) |
| 2000 | Paul Israel, Edison, A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley, 1998) |
| 1999 | Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 1997) |
| 1998 | Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (Princeton University Press, 1997) |
| 1997 | Thomas J. Misa, A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865-1925 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (Harvard University Press, 1995) |
| 1996 | Jeffrey Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (Rutgers University Press, 1995) |
| 1995 | Claude Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (University of California Press, 1992) |
| 1994 | John H. White, Jr., The American Railroad Freight Car: From the Wood-Car to the Coming of Steel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) |
| 1993 | David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (MIT Press, 1990) |
| 1992 | Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Harvard University Press, 1991) |
| 1991 | Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell University Press, 1989) |
| 1990 | Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West (Cambridge University Press, 1989) |
| 1989 | Judith A. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801-1885 (Princeton University Press, 1987), and Anthony F. C. Wallace, St. Clair: A Nineteenth-century Coal Town’s Experience with Disaster-prone Industry (Knopf, 1987) |
*Formerly the Dexter prize