UC Davis history professor Alan Taylor is one of two scholars who received the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American history last week at Columbia University. Taylor is being awarded the prize for his book William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, published by Alfred A. Knopf. The other recipient is David S. Reynolds, a professor at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the CityUniversity of New York, for Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. Each will receive $4,000. The prizes were presented last week at the 49th annual awards during a black-tie dinner on the Columbia campus. The prize was established at Columbia in 1948 with a bequest from Frederic Bancroft, a historian, author and librarian of the Department of State, to recognize books of exceptional merit in American history, biography or diplomacy. Books eligible for the 1996 prize were published in 1995. Taylor's book chronicles the life of the founder of Cooperstown, N.Y., and the father of the 19th-century American novelist James Fenimore Cooper. William Cooper advanced his fortunes after the Revolutionary War by gaining control of large tracts of land and subdividing them, and improved his prospects in life through a program of self-education and political aspiration. Fenimore Cooper based his third novel, The Pioneers, on his family's life in frontier Cooperstown. Taylor, 40, has been a professor at UC Davis since 1994, specializing in early American history and the history of the American West. Previously he taught at Boston University, the College of William and Mary, and Colby College. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Early American History and Culture at William and Mary and received research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the National Humanities Center and the Huntington Library. He is a graduate of Colby College and Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D. in American history in 1986. He is also the author of Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820. His William Cooper's Town received the 1995 New York State Historical Association Manuscript Award. Others who have won the Bancroft Prize since it was first awarded in 1949 include C. Vann Woodward, George F. Kennan, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Daniel J. Boorstin.