L&S alumna wins prestigious Bancroft Prize for book on James Madison

March 18th 2016 Simon Kuran
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Mary Sarah Bilder Mary Sarah Bilder

A book on the 1787 Constitutional Convention and two books on the way encounters with Native Americans shaped the emerging American nation have won the Bancroft Prize, considered one of the most prestigious honors in the field of American history.

Mary Sarah Bilder (BA'87 English), a professor at Boston College Law School, won for “Madison’s Hand: Revisiting the Constitutional Convention” (Harvard University Press), which uses both digital technology and traditional textual analysis to study how James Madison continuously revised his influential notes on the event, thus sharply challenging their claim to be an objective contemporaneous account.

Story by Jennifer Schuessler and reposted from The New York Times