Dean Awarded Bancroft Prize

Allan M. Brandt, the new dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded this year’s Bancroft Prize for his comprehensive study of the tobacco industry.

Brandt won the prestigious history prize, awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University, for his book, “The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America.”

“The premise of the book was that cigarettes represented so many central aspects of our culture,” Brandt, who was traveling and could not be reached by phone, said in an e-mail yesterday.

Brandt called the experience of working on his book “very rewarding.”

“It gave me a chance to use my research in such a public setting in a very significant case,” he said.

Anne Harrington, the History of Science department chair, said in an interview yesterday that Brandt’s book is a “moral story.”

“The book is not neutral about the story it tells,” she said. “It teaches general lessons about the ways in which powerful interests can manipulate people’s psychology to make something desirable.”

The Bancroft Prize is the most coveted award for those who work in the field of history, Harrington added.

Brandt said he hopes that readers will come away from his book with a sense of both “the history of the current tobacco epidemic,” as well as “some strategies for addressing it.”

According to Brandt, the World Health Organization estimates that about 100 million people worldwide died of tobacco related causes in the 20th century and that 1 billion will die in the 21st century.

“This is a sobering statistic given that we have learned so much during the course of the last century about the harms of smoking,” Brandt said.

The Bancroft Prizes were established at Columbia in 1948 to provide development of library resources, support research in American history and diplomacy, and recognize exceptional books, according to Columbia University’s press release.

This year’s three Bancroft winners will each receive an award of $10,000.