William Storey, professor of history at Millsaps College, has been selected by the Society for the History of Technology to receive the 2009 Edelstein Prize, which is given annually for the year’s best scholarly book about the history of technology. The award was presented in October at SHOT’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh.
“Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa” (Cambridge University Press, 2008) traces the co-evolution of guns, gun cultures, and colonial political economy in South Africa over three centuries. Through his writing, Storey shows how guns figured in the lives and everyday practices of the region's peoples and bridges the gap between historians of nineteenth-century South Africa and historians of nineteenth-century technology.
“Dr. Storey, like many of our professors, is an exceptional teacher who devotes time in and out of the classroom to make sure his students have a full understanding of the subject matter. He is also a committed scholar whose twelve years of research and writing have produced this ground-breaking work on the impact of technology on cultural and political change in southern Africa,” said David Davis, interim vice president and dean of the College.
Since joining the Millsaps faculty in 1999, Storey has been recognized for his talents as both a teacher and scholar. He received the Outstanding Young Faculty Award from Millsaps in 2003 and the Teaching Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council in 2006. In addition, he has received grants from the Mellon Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Millsaps College which allowed him to travel to England and South Africa to complete research.
“When I came up with the topic for “Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa,” I was looking for a case study that would help me to understand how local people in Africa adapted and modified a new technology – and how people debated the right and the wrong ways to use these technologies,” Storey said.
He first began working on the book in 1997 and spent two years working on it full-time. After coming to Millsaps, he spent a majority of his time teaching and learning with Millsaps students as well as with his own five children—now ranging from ages five to eleven. Each summer was devoted to one chapter and during a sabbatical in the 2007-08 school year, Storey spent four months making the final revisions.
“I’d say that if there is one lesson to be learned from the book, it’s that the successful regulation of a technology (guns, cell phones, contraceptives, etc.) depends on reconfiguring notions of citizenship,” Storey said.
Incorporating scholarly research into the classroom is a way to bring the subject area to life. Storey used many of the responses and comments students in his British Empire class made to the first draft of the manuscript to shape the book’s final form. Next semester, he plans to use parts of the book in his new Environment, Technology, and Power class.
Since finishing the book, Storey has completed another book, “The First World War: A Concise Global History” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). His next project is a biography of Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate and politician who endowed the Rhodes Scholarships. He intends the book to be the first biography on Rhodes written from the perspective of environment and technology.
Storey earned his bachelor's degree in history at Harvard University in 1987. He completed a master's degree in history in 1990 at Johns Hopkins University, where he received a doctorate in 1993. He and his wife, Dr. Joanna Miller Storey, live in Madison with their five children.
