The 2017 AEJMC History Division Book Award, honoring the best journalism and mass communication history book published in 2016, has been won by Robert G. Parkinson for The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press). Parkinson is an assistant professor of history at Binghamton University, where he teaches courses in colonial America, the American Revolution and Founding, American slavery, and Native American history.

A panel of three distinguished media historians chose The Common Cause from a field of 26 entries. The judges praised Parkinson’s “impressive archival and primary source work that led to a fundamental revision of two historiographical streams: the history of the American Revolution and the history of journalism.” The Common Cause argues that patriot leaders united the thirteen colonies by defining the British as the enemies of American freedom, using narratives about resistant slaves, hostile Indians, and German mercenaries that would imbed ideas of racial difference into the ideology of the new nation.

Parkinson, who will receive a plaque and a cash prize, has been invited to speak about his work during the History Division business meeting on Friday, August 11 (7:00 - 8:30 p.m.) at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention in Chicago.