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The University of Virginia issued the following news release:
University of Virginia historian Sophia Rosenfeld has received the 2012 Lynton History Prize and the 2012 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize for common sense. Or, more accurately, for "Common Sense: A Political History," her 2011 book on what people seem to take for granted.
"The book is a history of how common sense and democracy have been implicated since the 18th century," she said. "I am interested in how we first became convinced that ordinary people's perceptions can be used for making decisions in politics - that running a government is not necessarily much different from making decisions around a kitchen table."
Rosenfeld teaches 17th- and 18th-century European history in the College of Arts & Sciences' Corcoran Department of History. Her coursework includes the Enlightenment and the age of revolutions. She looks at events such as the American and French revolutions and how they relate to political conversations today.
The Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University annually award the Mark Lynton History Prize to "a book-length work of history...