The Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University is delighted to announce this year’s winner of the Edgar S. Furniss Book Award is Carly Goodman, for her book  Dreamland: America’s Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). 

Commemorating the founding director of the Mershon Center, the Furniss Award is conferred annually on a first book in English that makes an exceptional contribution to the study of international, national, and/or human security. The current award is for a book published in the calendar year of 2023.

Dreamland tells the story of the United States Diversity Visa Lottery and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration. Historian Carly Goodman takes readers from Washington, D.C., where proponents deployed a colorblind narrative about our "nation of immigrants" to secure visas for white immigrants, to the African countries where it flourished and fostered dreams of going to America. From the post office to the internet, aspiring emigrants, visa agents, and others embraced the lottery and tried their luck in a time of austerity and limits. Rising African immigration to the United States has enriched American life, created opportunities for mobility, and nourished imagined possibilities. But the promise of the American dream has been threatened by the United States' embrace of anti-immigrant policies and persistent anti-Black racism.

The committee, representing four disciplines, described the winning entry as follows.

We were impressed by both the breadth of the cases she examines and the careful grounding of her discussion in economic and political frameworks. She begins her discussion with the Irish, a choice that provides both interesting historical context and a way to locate her book within questions of legislation and attitudes toward race and whiteness. We thought the biggest contribution of the book is Goodman’s on-the-ground research about the Ghanaian and Cameroonian lottery operations. As with most immigration policies, the lottery spawned whole industries. She has visited these, and her photos of them add depth to her discussion. We also applaud her discussion of remittances and scams. This well-researched and well-written book covers an important topic from both sides: the countries where the applicants lived as well as the U.S., the country to which they yearned to go. Finally, alas, it’s very topical!

Goodman's visit to Ohio State for the award presentation and lecture will take place in Spring 2025.

Carly Goodman is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University-Camden. She also serves as senior editor of Made by History at TIME Magazine (formerly at The Washington Post) and previously served as a visiting assistant professor of history at La Salle University. She consults on public history projects including the National Immigration Museum at Ellis Island (2023-present) and was the Mellon/American Council of Learned Society Public Fellow and Communications Analyst at American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia. In addition, she has worked at Nationalities Service Center in Philadelphia and Human Rights First in New York. She earned her doctorate in history from Temple University and a Bachelor of Arts in history from Columbia University.