Langum Foundation News
This page is for current and upcoming news of the Trust and its work. Check back here periodically for links to news stories, upcoming deadlines, and late-breaking information.
JULY 25, 2025
The Langum Retreats
Welcome to the Langum Foundation’s new summer residences for writing on history and literature. These summer residences are set in Port Townsend, Washington, a community of writers and artists on Puget Sound, Washington. Dozens of writing, jazz, fiddle, vocal, and chamber music festivals are on offer each summer, together with associated public and private conferences and talks. This small city has an excellent bookstore, two movie theatres, and a marvelous climate averaging in the upper 60s during the “hot” days and nights. It is close to many inspiring drives in the nearby Olympic Mountains.
The residencies are held within the Langum homestead of Graystones, 821 Polk Street, Port Townsend, Washington 98368. The residence holder enjoys a five-week tenure on the first floor of the primary residence and a separate large study on the site. This study has a large wooden desk and a collection of more than 1,200 books, including 800 biographies. The use of these facilities is available free of additional charge to the holder of a Langum residency. Nor is there any additional charge for the use of the main facilities. There are no programs or active conferences at the residencies. Rather, the program is intended for the serious writer who is engaged in a major piece of writing on a significant work, generally a book.
There are no enrollment fees, but a significant body of writing is required for submission. The three residency periods are May 15-June 20, June 20-July 25, and July 25-August 29th, plus two days for housekeeping on the side of each residency period. Applications should be sent to David J. Langum, Sr., Executive Director, 2809 Berkeley Drive, Hoover, Alabama 35242 | Cell: (360) 809-0465.
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MAY 23, 2025
David J. Langum, Sr., Announces Retirement
David J. Langum, Sr., founder, director, and chairman of the board of The Langum Foundation, announces his retirement as director and chairman of the board as of the close of the next trustees’ meeting, to be held in January 2026. Under his leadership the Foundation has grown from a capital of $28,000 when it was founded in 2001 to its present net worth of approximately $l,200,000. It has awarded more than 50 literary prizes in American Historical Fiction, American Legal History and Biography, and Recording Community Activism, and has granted six travel awards to scholars wishing to use the Langum and de Mattos collections at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield. He will be succeeded as executive director by Grace Eskridge Langum. Langum, Sr. will remain on the Foundation’s board of directors.
MARCH 16, 2025
The Winner of the 2024 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History is The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States, by Stuart Banner
Professor Banner has written one of the best one-volume histories of the U.S. Supreme Court. He has a gift for synthesizing formidable quantities of complex issues in a highly engaging narrative that will be accessible to general readers and informative even for specialists. This book aptly places the Court in a social, political, cultural, and economic context, and presents the Justices and their decisions in a vivid and erudite manner. – W.G.R.
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The Finalist of the 2024 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History is Nobody’s Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, by Hendrik Hartog
This engrossing tale, about Jack Robbins’ nearly forgotten institution for neglected, homeless, and delinquent adolescent boys, has multiple achievements. For legal historians, Hartog demonstrates the value of viewing legal systems, legal culture, and justice capaciously; for the general reader, it provides a panoramic cross-country ride that illustrates the challenges progressive ideas and activism faced in the service of the powerless during the “American Century.” No one will be able to put this page turner down. – D.S.
FEBRUARY 5, 2025
The winner of the 2023-2024 Malott Prize for Recording Community Activism is You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America, by Paul Kix.
Paul Kix provides a comprehensive and riveting account of a crucial period in the civil rights movement in You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America. He provides an epic narrative arc, that gives new insight into the actions of figures such as Martin Luther King, Robert and John F. Kennedy, and Harry Belafonte. But he never strays far from absolutely crucial developments within Black Birmingham communities. The heroism of local civil rights advocates in the South’s most segregated city comes through vividly in Kix’s telling. The book focuses on the courageous actions of Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth (whose quote becomes the title of the book). And it describes the preparation in schools and neighborhoods that preceded the key decision to bring Birmingham’s children into the peaceful efforts to strike at segregation. In placing the citizens of Birmingham at the center of the story, Kix adds depth to an important chapter in the history of the civil rights movement. In this regard, the book is richly deserving of the Malott Prize for Recording Community Activism. – F.M.S.
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The finalist of the 2023-2024 Malott Prize for Recording Community Activism is Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity, by Laura Meckler.
Laura Meckler provides a vivid account of the generations-long fight to create and preserve the racially integrated town of Shaker Heights, Ohio, in Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equality. Meckler’s book describes the tenacious idealism of those who first envisioned Shaker Heights as an integrated community, adjacent to the city of Cleveland. These heroic figures set Shaker Heights on a path that diverged sharply from the segregation that plagued suburban communities in the Cleveland area and around the nation. Meckler’s account demonstrates the never-ending struggle against the forces that would roll back early efforts at integration. That these struggles took place in areas such as schools, banks, real estate offices, and city hall, makes them no less dramatic in Meckler’s telling. And the book prioritizes the work of Shaker Heights residents as they held government officials and powerful private interests accountable. In this way, Dream Town is richly deserving of acknowledgment as a compelling account of community activism. – F.M.S.