AWARDS & REVIEWS

Awards

MINNESOTA BOOK AWARDS: Winner of the 2019 Minnesota Book Award for Minnesota Nonfiction. The Minnesota Book Awards is an annual celebration of the state's best books. More than 220 works by Minnesota authors and poets, published in 2018, were submitted for the awards; a panel of judges narrowed that field down to 36 finalists in January. The winners for the 2019 Minnesota Book Awards were announced on Saturday, April 6, at the annual Awards Ceremony.

Midwestern History Association: Winner of the 2019 Hamlin Garland Prize. The Midwestern History Association selected Susan Bartlett Foote’s The Crusade for Forgotten Souls for the Hamlin Garland Prize as the best popular work in Midwestern History for 2018. For purposes of the award, “the Midwest” includes the twelve states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The selection committee commended the work for its engaging, sympathetic, and scholarly examination of how Minnesota sought to improve the treatment of its citizens in mental institutions.

Reviews

Ramsey County History Magazine: Book Review, Minnesota Book Awards; Gary F. Gleason, Spring, 2019. "Susan Bartlett Foote has written an impressive book that combines a great story and exhaustive research about the early years of social welfare reform... a stirring document that reminds us of the work done and challenges us to continue on this foundation."

STAR TRIBUNE: "Review: 'The Crusade for Forgotten Souls,' by Susan Bartlett Foote"; Chris Serres, April 17, 2018. "If modern-day reformers wish to understand the perils of isolating people in controlled environments, they should begin by reading an extraordinary new book on the history of mental health care reform in Minnesota, “The Crusade for Forgotten Souls” by Susan Bartlett Foote."

MinnPost: "‘Crusaders’ who reformed state’s psychiatric hospitals highlighted in new book"; Andy Steiner, April 2, 2018. "The key figures in this effort...had very little in common except for a clear-headed determination to change the way the state cared for its citizens with mental illness."

Review published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine; Kathleen M Brian, November 27, 2018. "The book’s empirical prowess is facilitated by its archival richness."

UU World: Elaine McArdle, Spring 2019. "This compelling book reveals the unsung efforts of Minnesotan Unitarians in the 1940s as they made common cause with the Republican governor, becoming his strongest backers in efforts for compassionate care for the mentally ill."

Canadian Journal of History, 10/18/2019. Geoffrey Reaume, York University. "Foote adds to the field of asylum studies by providing a well-researched and eloquently written history of unfulfilled efforts to reform Minnesota’s mental institutions at a time when such places were hell-holes for people confined therein."