The Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) is proud to announce the winners of the Sharon Ritenour Stevens Prize for 20/21: Manaswini Ramkumar, a PhD candidate in International Relations and an adjunct faculty member of the School of International Service at American University, Washington, DC; and William A. Taylor, Associate Professor of Global Security Studies at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Security Studies at Angelo State University in San Angelo, TX.  Both receive $1,000 in support of their work with documents.

Ramkumar’s project, “Call of Duty: Military Responses to Undemocratic Leadership,” explores an historic conflict between a democratic military cadre and undemocratic civilian leaders. Using India’s history and politics as a test case, she will examine military documents and correspondence between the increasingly autocratic regime of democratically elected Indira Gandhi and the Indian armed forces. During Gandhi’s regime, a conflicted military establishment refused to organize a coup but also refused to obey undemocratic orders. Ramkumar will examine materials in archives in New Delhi, Pune, and Dehradun, India, as the basis for her interviews with former military commanders of that era. A global citizen, she has lived, studied and worked in the USA, Russia, India, and Singapore and currently lives in Canada.

Taylor’s project, “The Advent of the All-Volunteer Force: Protecting Free Society,” involves documents exploring the history of the transition of the U.S. armed services to an all-volunteer U.S. military beginning in 1973. A major issue within the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) has been the role of women and other-gendered persons in military life. Taylor is working on a text that will be the first supplemental text for undergraduate American history courses to address these matters through document sources, especially focusing on the impact of women in uniformed military service. The resulting volume, to appear as part of the Routledge Critical Moments in American History series, will be roughly one-half edited narrative and one-half document sources. The prize will allow Taylor to collect document sources relating to women in uniformed military service before the advent of the AVF at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Kansas, and present these document sources to a broad audience in the resulting book. A companion website will accompany publication of the book and include documents relating to the AVF.

The Sharon Ritenour Stevens Prize was created in 2019 to honor the contributions of an early member of ADE to the organization and profession. In keeping with her work as Associate Editor of the Papers of George C. Marshall, the prize goes to a scholar or editor currently pursuing a project of military, women’s, or cultural history that contributes to or utilizes documentary editing. Preference is given to persons in their initial or midstream phase of work and is partly based on need. Deadline for the 21/22 prize competition is 15 November 2021.