Jane Brailove Rutkoff, for exceptional contributions to the public humanities in New Jersey.

NJCH Book Award

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (W.W. Norton)  

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. In The Honor Code, Appiah examines "moral revolutions" or moments when a society decides that a longstanding practice is no longer reputable. By using four case studies from divergent cultures and time periods, Appiah makes a compelling case that honor is a critical, though ignored, engine for social change, and has been at the heart of reforms as sweeping as the abolishment of the British slave trade and the end of Chinese footbinding. Appiah has taught and published widely in African-American studies and philosophy and currently serves as the President of the PEN American Center. Foreign Policy magazine named him one of its top global thinkers in 2010.

Thomas Belton, Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State (Rutgers University Press)

Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (University of Chicago Press)

Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Michael Perino, The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora’s Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance (Penguin Press).

Teacher of the Year

Ellen Cahill

Ellen Cahill is a kindergarten teacher at Bradford School in Montclair. She has been named Teacher of the Year for her ability to bring an interdisciplinary study of the humanities to some of New Jersey’s youngest students. By focusing the curriculum on her students’ interests, history, language, geography and the sciences are woven into their lives, creating a highly engaged learning environment. In particular, Cahill fosters her students’ love of learning through a Philosophy for Children program, encouraging democracy in her classroom and makes students owners of their own knowledge from an early age.  Her unique teaching of the humanities makes her a model of effective early childhood education, and NJCH is delighted to celebrate her as an outstanding humanities educator.