2023 Book of Merit Award Winners Announced
The 2023 Book of Merit Award has been awarded to two books: to Mary Elise Antoine for Enslaved, Indentured, Free: Five Black Women on the Upper Mississippi, 1800-1850, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, and to Beatrice McKenzie for The Wongs of Beloit, Wisconsin, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
About the Books
Enslaved, Indentured, Free: Five Black Women on the Upper Mississippi, 1800-1850, by Mary Elise Antoine, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 made slavery illegal in the territory that would later become Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. However, many Black individuals’ rights were denied by white enslavers who continued to hold them captive in the territory well into the nineteenth century. Enslaved, Indentured, Free shines a light on five extraordinary Black women—Marianne, Mariah, Patsey, Rachel, and Courtney—whose lives intersected in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, during these seminal years.
Focusing on these five women, Mary Elise Antoine explores the history of slavery in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, relying on legal documents, military records, court transcripts, and personal correspondence. Whether through perseverance, self-purchase, or freedom suits—including one suit that was used as precedent in Dred and Harriet Scott’s freedom suits years later—each of these women ultimately secured her freedom, thanks in part to the bonds they forged with one another.
Antoine’s book is unique in the telling of a period in Wisconsin’s history through the complicated nature of these women’s experiences due to circumstance and geography. It is an eye-opening account of well-researched experiences encompassing events in history that remain relevant and impactful in 2023. The academic scholarship was outstanding as well as the evident research methodology using legal documents, military records, court transcripts, and correspondence.
The Wongs of Beloit, Wisconsin, by Beatrice McKenzie, published by the University of Wisconsin Press
Through family interviews, original photographs, and national records, Beatrice Loftus McKenzie traces the many lives of a resilient multigenerational family whose experiences parallel the complicated relationship between America and China in the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, Charles Wong moved from Guangdong Province to the United States and opened the Nan King Lo Restaurant in Beloit, Wisconsin. Soon after, his wife Yee Shee joined him to build the “Chop House” into a local institution and start a family. When the Great Depression hit, the Wongs shared what they had with their neighbors. In 1938, Charles’s tragic murder left Yee Shee to raise their seven children—ages one through fourteen—on her own. Rather than return to family property in Hong Kong, she and her children stayed in Beloit, buoyed by the friendships they had forged during the worst parts of the 1930s.
The Wongs thrived in Beloit despite facing racism and classism, embracing wartime opportunities, education, love, and careers within the U. S. McKenzie’s collaboration with descendent Mary Wong Palmer reveals a poignant story of Chinese immigrant life in the Upper Midwest that adds a much-needed Wisconsin perspective to existing literature by and about Asian Americans.
The book provides a unique perspective on Wisconsin immigrant history using one family in Wisconsin whose experiences parallel the national tensions between America and China in the 20th century. In addition to exemplary scholarly and archival research, McKenzie collaborated with the Wong family to write their history. With the use of original photographs, national records, and oral family history as well as secondary sources, lines were connected to global politics, xenophobia, and World War II experiences from the perspective of Chinese and Chinese American experiences in Wisconsin.
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