Tom Okie wins Nevins Dissertation Prize

By all accounts, this award is akin to winning a Pulitzer Prize for a dissertation. Huge congratulations to our history department and to newly minted Ph.D. Tom Okie:

University of Georgia doctoral graduate Tom Okie was awarded the 53rd annual Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize at the annual meeting of the Society of American Historians at the Century Club in New York City on May 20. The prize—$2,000 and publication of the winning dissertation—is awarded for the best-written doctoral dissertation on an American subject. The award honors the society's founder and first president.

Okie's dissertation, "‘Everything is Peaches Down in Georgia': Culture and Agriculture in the American South," was completed and defended at the conclusion of his study at UGA in the summer of 2012. The work explores the ascendance of the peach as a symbol of the post-Civil War South, as well as an ecological alternative to cotton in establishing a more permanent culture in the region.

"Cotton had a bad reputation by the end of the war," said Okie, who taught history as a visiting assistant professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, in 2012-13 and will be an assistant professor at Kennesaw State University starting this fall.

The story of peaches in the South is far more intriguing than it might seem and Okie's narrative looks back even at it looks forward in creating the cultural context of the story. This is going to be a great book, an important book, and its selection for the Nevins Prize is inspiring on many levels - not least of which is the contemplation of such a powerful symbol for our state.