Two UNP authors — Jay Gallentine and Margaret D. Jacobs — recently won three prestigious national awards, and we couldn’t be more proud.

 
Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft, by Jay Gallentine, won the annual Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award, which is sponsored by the American Astonautical Society. Ambassadors from Earth tell the story behind the first unmanned space probes and planetary explorers. It includes everything from the Sputnik and Explorer satellites in the 1950s to the Voyager Missions of the 1970s. Gallentine uses original interviews with keyplayers, never-before-seen photos and journal excerpts to illustrate the lives and legacies of the Americans and Soviets who experienced space exploration like no one else. Gallentine will receive the award for Ambassadors from Earth (part of UNP’s Outward Odyssey series) at the annual AAS conference in Florida in November.

 
Some Friday AAS/UNP trivia: Several other books in the Outward Odyssey series have been named finalists for the Emme Award, but Ambassadors is the first to win the whole shebang. Congratulations!

 
White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940, by Margaret D. Jacobs, has won the Robert G. Athearn Prize, sponsored by the Western History Association, and the Armitage Jameson Prize, sponsored the Coalition for Western Women’s History.

 
In White Mother to a Dark Race, Jacobs explores the once widespread practice of removing indigenous children from their families in in an attempt to assimilate them into American and Australian mainstream culture. Jacobs examines the key roles white women played in these policies of indigenous child-removal, as well as the trauma these polices placed on indigenous families.

 
White Mother to a Dark Race also won this year’s Bancroft Prize – one of the top prizes for history.