BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana State University professor Nathan Kalmoe’s book about the Civil War has won awards from two professional associations.
“With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War” has awards from both the International Society of Political Psychology and the American Political Science Association, the university said in a news release Friday.
The book shows “just how extreme mass politics can be when we look beyond the recent past,” Kalmoe said
Kalmoe is political communication area head at LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication and holds a joint appointment in the LSU Department of Political Science.
His book, published in July 2020, is the 2021 co-winner of the David O. Sears Best Book on Mass Politics Award. The prize honors writing about the political psychology of mass politics, including political behavior, political values, political identities and political movements.
The other winner is LaFleur Stephens-Douglass, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University, for “Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics.”
The political science association gave Kalmoe’s book the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award for research and scholarship on political organizations and parties.
“I’m especially pleased for this recognition from political parties scholars, in addition to political psychology,” Kalmoe said. “It validates my efforts to write a book that contributes broadly across several areas of the social and political sciences.”
Kalmoe’s next book, scheduled for release early next year, is “Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, & What It Means for Democracy.
He and co-author Lilliana Mason measure the level of support for partisan violence today, along with other extreme attitudes, analyzing who holds these views, how they have changed from 2017 to 2021, and how messages from political leaders inflame or pacify these views.