Past Recipients

The Louis Knott Koontz Memorial Award of $250 is given annually for the most deserving contribution to the Pacific Historical Review—a journal of American and Pacific History and the official journal of the Pacific Coast Branch.
 
The prize, given by the Pacific Historical Review and supported by the University of California Press, honors the journal’s former managing editor, Louis K. Koontz (1890-1951).
 
Koontz graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1908, and completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1914 and 1920, respectively. He served as a faculty member and president of both Frederick College in Maryland, and Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia. He served as an educational supervisor for the Army in the United States and during 1920-1921 in the Philippines. He also briefly worked on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1922, Koontz, along with John C. Parish and J. B. Lockey, was hired at the then-Southern Branch of the University of California (now UCLA) as an instructor in history, attaining the rank of Associate Professor in 1930 and that of Full Professor in 1943.
 
Koontz was central to the growth of historical scholarship on the Pacific Coast through his position as associate editor and managing editor of the Pacific Historical Review, from 1936 to 1947. As managing editor, he brought scholars in the west into contact with their colleagues on the east coast and published articles on the history of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the Pacific world. His publications included The History of the Virginia Frontier, 1754-1763 (1925), Robert Dinwiddie, His Career in American Colonial Government and Westward Expansion (1941), and (as editor) The Persistence of the Westward Movement and Other Essays by John Carl Parish (1943). He was one of the three faculty hired to seed the history department (along with John C. Parish and Joseph B. Lockey) in 1922 at the University of California Southern Branch (UCLA) and turn it into the internationally respected program it is today.

The Board of Editors of the Review makes the selection.

For further information about the Louis Knott Koontz Memorial Award and submission guidelines, please contact The Board of Editors of the Pacific Historical Review.