Raymond J. Cunningham Prize
The submission deadline has passed. Awardees are announced in the fall, and the next contest will begin in spring 2023.
The American Historical Association offers the Raymond J. Cunningham Prize annually for the best article published in a journal written by an undergraduate student. The prize was established in memory of Raymond J. Cunningham, who was an associate professor of history at Fordham University. He was an authority on American historian Herbert Baxter Adams.
The current prize amount is $500 each to the author and journal. See the list of past recipients.
Eligibility
The prize selection committee has typically given preference to articles that incorporate primary sources. The article must be published in a journal between May 1, 2022, and April 30, 2023.
Application Process
Log into your MY AHA account at historians.org/myaha and click “Available Application Forms” in the AHA Awards, Grants, and Jobs section. If you don't have an account, create one for free at historians.org/createaccount. If nominating someone else, select the Nominate button and search for the nominee’s existing record or create a new record.
- Fill in the application form, which includes the nominee’s contact information and the name of the article, journal, and faculty advisor.
- Upload an Application Packet as a single PDF. Include the following documents:
- Letter of support (no more than 2 pages)
- Copy of the article
Only ONE article from a specific journal may be nominated each year.
Please Note: Entries must be received by May 15, 2023, to be eligible for the 2023 competition. Entries will not be returned. Recipients will be announced on the AHA website in October 2023 and recognized during a ceremony at the January 2024 AHA annual meeting in San Francisco.
For questions, please contact the Prize Administrator.
2022 Cunningham Prize
Tara Madhav, University of California, Berkeley
“‘We Had to Do the Educating Ourselves’: Community Control and Desegregation at Ravenswood High School in East Palo Alto, California, 1958-76,” Clio's Scroll: The Berkeley Undergraduate History Journal 23, no. 1 (Fall 2021)
Faculty adviser: Bernadette J. Pérez, University of California, Berkeley
Tara Madhav explores the process of desegregation in East Palo Alto following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Moving beyond earlier scholarly views focused on busing and racial balance, Madhav argues that the unequal educational experiences for Black students at Ravenswood High School were founded on the school’s inability to create a culturally responsive and empowering education that focused on academic performance and community cultural resonance as the standards of educational justice. This is an important contribution to the historiography on desegregation.