Two University of Colorado at Boulder professors were named winners of this year's Colorado Book Awards.
"Messages from Frank's Landing" by law Distinguished Professor Charles Wilkinson and "Crucible of War" by history Professor Fred Anderson took the awards for the "Colorado and the West" and "History and Biography" categories, respectively.
A third book, "Riverwalk," written by William Wylie and published by University Press of Colorado, was the winner in the pictorial category. CU-Boulder is one of the member organizations of the University Press of Colorado.
"It's a rare honor for two professors from the same university to win two different Colorado Book Awards at the same time. It shows that the academic achievements of CU professors are highly regarded in the community," said Christiane Citron, executive director of the Colorado Center for the Book, organizer of the annual event.
Wilkinson, the author of 12 books, is a national authority on Indian law and public land law. In "Messages from Frank's Landing," Wilkinson explores the life of one of the principal activists in the struggle for Indian fishing rights, the charismatic Billy Frank Jr., whose protests ultimately led to the historic 1974 ruling by federal Judge George H. Boldt affirming the treaty rights of Northwest tribal fishermen.
Wilkinson graduated from Stanford Law School and practiced with private firms in Phoenix and San Francisco and then with the Native American Rights Fund. In 1975, Wilkinson joined the University of Oregon law faculty. He visited at the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota law schools before moving to Colorado in 1987. CU has named him a distinguished professor, one of only 20 holding the title on the CU-Boulder campus.
The other winning book, "Crucible of War" by Anderson, is a narrative that explains the role of colonial America's Seven Years' War in developing the attitudes and issues that would result in the Revolutionary War. In the book, Anderson lays out the battles, landscapes and personalities of the war, allowing readers to see how George Washington and King George II, among others, shaped the outcome of the conflict Winston Churchill called the First World War.
The Colorado Book Award was the third prize awarded to "Crucible of War." The book also received the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians, awarded to "the best book in American history," and the Mark Lynton History Prize, awarded by Columbia and Harvard Universities.
Anderson is the author of two books. His first book, "A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War," published in 1984, received the Jamestown Prize from the Institute of Early American History and Culture as the best first book in early American history.
Anderson earned his doctorate at Harvard University in 1981 and taught at Harvard in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature before joining the CU-Boulder history department in 1983. Anderson's areas of specialization are the colonial period, the American Revolution and early national U.S. history.
The Colorado Book Awards are given annually to the Colorado authors of the best books published in the preceding year as judged by the Colorado book community. There were 12 winners of this year's awards.