History professor awarded fellowship to finish book

Thursday, April 7, 2016
UNH professor Eliga Gould

Prof. Eliga Gould has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Eliga Gould, professor of history, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a book on the least studied of the United States’ founding documents, the Treaty of 1783 that ended the American Revolutionary War.

Gould, who has taught at UNH since 1992, will take his fellowship in 2018-19 to conduct additional research and finish writing “Crucible of Peace: 1783 and the Founding of the American Republic.”

“My goal is to write an innovative, accessible book that explores an important but often overlooked founding document in the early history of the United States,” said Gould. “I aim to set the record straight in this book, restoring the treaty to its proper place alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”

In his latest book, “Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire,” he explored the many ways in which the early American republic’s quest to be accepted as a “treaty worthy” nation by Europe’s colonial powers shaped American thinking about an array of issues, including federalism, Native American treaty rights and the abolition of slavery.

The book has been widely praised, including on The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page and by Noam Chomsky, who highlighted the concept of treaty worthiness in an editorial on contemporary U.S. foreign policy. Named a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, “Among the Powers” received the SHEAR Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.

Professor Eliga Gould
Prof. Eliga Gould

Gould has held long-term fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard.

His other publications include “The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution” and “Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World,” co-edited with Peter S. Onuf, as well as numerous articles, book chapters and review essays.



Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted more than $334 million in fellowships to more than 18,000 individuals, including scores of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, Turing Award winners, poets laureate, members of the various national academies and winners of the Pulitzer Prize and other ihonors. Gould is one of 178 scholars, artists and scientists to receive a 2016 fellowship.