[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 120 (Tuesday, July 29, 2014)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1257-E1258]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    CONGRATULATING ANNE FIROR SCOTT ON RECEIVING THE 2013 NATIONAL 
                            HUMANITIES MEDAL

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. DAVID E. PRICE

                           of north carolina

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 29, 2014

  Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to 
congratulate North Carolina's Anne Firor Scott on receiving the 2013 
National Humanities Medal. Dr. Scott is being cited ``for pioneering 
the study of southern women. Through groundbreaking research spanning 
ideology, race, and class, Dr. Scott's uncharted exploration into the 
lives of southern women has established women's history as vital to our 
understanding of the American South.'' I have the privilege of 
personally knowing Dr. Scott, W.K. Boyd Professor of History Emerita at 
Duke, as a former academic colleague, constituent, and friend.
   Raised in Montezuma, Georgia, Scott graduated summa cum laude and 
Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Georgia in 1941 before earning a 
master's degree in political science from Northwestern University in 
1944 and a PhD from Harvard (Radcliffe College) in 1949.
   Dr. Scott did not, however, immediately pursue an academic career. 
She held a job at International Business Machines (IBM) and briefly 
entered a graduate program for personnel managers. Scott notes that it 
was a United States Congressional internship, during which she had the 
opportunity to write speeches and listen to politicians talking, which 
had the greatest impact on her career. These experiences, she later 
wrote, ``made me so painfully aware of my ignorance that I went back to 
school.''
   Following her master's and PhD work, Scott held temporary teaching 
appointments at Haverford College and the University of North Carolina 
at Chapel Hill before joining the history department at Duke University 
in 1961, where she stayed until her retirement in 1991. During her 
tenure at Duke, Dr. Scott became the first female chair of Duke's 
history department. In her autobiographical essay, ``A Historian's 
Odyssey,'' Scott reviewed her own journals and realized that she began 
to do history by chance. But, she added, ``If I came to history by 
indirection, my decision to study the history of women was not, in 
retrospect, accidental.''
   Having been inspired to study women reformers after working for the 
National League of Women Voters in the 1940s, Scott later helped found 
the field of U.S. women's history. Her groundbreaking research--
spanning ideology, race, and class--and her uncharted exploration into 
the lives of southern women has established women's history as vital to 
our understanding of the American South. The Anne Firor Scott papers, 
which include correspondence, subject files and videos from 1963-2002, 
are held at Duke University.
   Her endowment, the Anne Firor Scott Research Fund, established in 
1987, continues to support students conducting innovative independent 
research in women's history. And the annual Lerner-Scott prize, an 
award which is jointly named for Dr. Scott and historian Gerda Lerner, 
is annually awarded to the writer of the best doctoral dissertation in 
U.S. women's history.
   Dr. Scott's accomplishments and accolades are many, including the 
authorship of ten

[[Page E1258]]

books and more than twenty-five articles. Dr. Scott was appointed by 
President Lyndon Johnson to the Citizens Advisory Council on the Status 
of Women in 1965. She has served as president of the Southern 
Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, and 
on the advisory boards of the Schlesinger Library, the Princeton 
University department of history, and the Woodrow Wilson International 
Center for Scholars.
   She has been the recipient of many fellowships, prizes and honorary 
degrees, including a University Medal from Duke in 1994, a Berkshire 
Conference Prize in 1980, and honorary degrees from Queens College, 
Northwestern, Radcliffe and the University of the South. Scott received 
the Organization of American Historians' Distinguished Service Award in 
2002 and the American Historical Association's Scholarly Achievement 
Award in 2008. In addition, Dr. Scott was the 1994 winner of the John 
Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities, which is the highest honor 
given by the North Carolina Humanities Council.
   This year, Dr. Scott is one of ten winners to be honored with the 
2013 National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama. 
The National Humanities Medal honors individuals or groups whose work 
has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened 
our citizens' engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and 
expand Americans' access to important resources in the humanities. 
Previous medalists include Pulitzer Prize winners Philip Roth and 
Marilynne Robinson, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, essayist Joan 
Didion, novelist John Updike, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, 
sociologist Robert Coles, poet John Ashbery, filmmaker Steven 
Spielberg, and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.
   As Jeffries Martin, chair of Duke's history department, has said, 
``Anne is not only an amazing scholar whose work did much to shape the 
field of women's history; she is also an amazing person, full of 
curiosity and insight about the world.'' I would add that she is a warm 
and generous person, mentor and friend to many, and a committed 
citizen--an effective voice for social justice and inclusion for 
decades. She is the model of the engaged scholar, and one who has 
contributed greatly to the ``New South'' to which we aspire. It is 
therefore with great satisfaction and admiration that I commend Anne 
Scott today for this wonderful, well-merited recognition.

                          ____________________