Raymond J. Cunningham Prize Recipients
The American Historical Association offers the Raymond J. Cunningham Prize for the best article published in a journal written by an undergraduate student. This prize, awarded annually, 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.
2023
Jacqueline Wu, "The Chinese Labor Experiment: Contract Workers in the Northeastern United States, 1870–1880," Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 90, no. 2 (Spring 2023)
Joe William Trotter, faculty advisor
2022
Tara Madhav, "'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)
Bernadette J. Pérez, faculty advisor
2021
Ann Tran, “A Bloody Solidarity: Nguyen Thai Binh and the Vietnamese Antiwar Movement in the Long Sixties,” The Boller Review 5 (2020)
Kara Dixon Vuic, faculty advisor
2020
Jubilee Marshall,“Race, Death, and Public Health in Early Philadelphia, 1750–1793,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies (Spring 2020)
2019
Lena Giger, "The Right to Participate and the Right to Compete: Stanford Women’s Athletics, 1956-1995," Herodotus (Spring 2019)
Estelle B. Freedman, faculty advisor
2018
Heath Rojas, "A Model of Revolutionary Regicide: The Role of Seventeenth-Century English History in the Trial of King Louis XVI," Herodotus (Spring 2018)
Keith Baker, faculty advisor
2017
Maxwell Ulin, "Dixie Turns Within: The United Nations and the Fall of Southern Internationalism," Yale Historical Review (Spring 2016)
Glenda Gilmore, faculty advisor
2016
Griffin Creech, "'Our Revolutionary Cadres Are Always beside the Masses': Reconsidering the Role of Khmer Rouge Cadres in Democratic Kampuchea," Traces: The UNC Chapel Hill Journal of History (Spring 2015)
Donald Reid, faculty advisor
2015
Michael Welker, "Nothing without a Demand: Black Power and Student Activism on North Carolina College Campuses, 1967-73," Traces: The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History (Spring 2014)
James Leloudis, faculty advisor
2014
Jacob Anbinder, "The South Shall Ride Again: The Origins of MARTA and the Making of the Urban South," Yale Historical Review 2, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 37-57
Glenda Gilmore, faculty advisor
2013
David Wemer, "Europe's Little Tiger? Reassessing Economic Transitions in Slovakia under the Meciar Government, 1993-98," Gettysburg College Historical Journal 12, no. 1 (2013): 97-112
William Bowman, faculty advisor
2012
T. Fielder Valone, "Destroying the Ties that Bind: Rituals of Humiliation and the Holocaust in Provincial Lithuania," in Traces: The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of Hist. 1 (Spring 2012): 90-114
W. Miles Fletcher, III, faculty advisor
2011
Daniel Williford, "Visions of Pre-Islamic Algeria in the Revue Africaine, 1870-1896," Rhodes Hist. Review 13 (Spring 2011): 45-69
Tim Huebner, faculty advisor
2010
Hailey Giczy, "The Bum Blockade: Los Angeles and the Great Depression," Voces Novae: Chapman Univ. Hist. Review 1 (2009): 97-121
Leland Estes, faculty advisor
2023 Cunningham Prize
Jacqueline Wu, Yale University
“The Chinese Labor Experiment: Contract Workers in the Northeastern United States, 1870–1880,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 90, no. 2 (Spring 2023)
Faculty adviser: Joe William Trotter, Carnegie Mellon University
Jacqueline Wu’s essay examines Chinese laborers in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania during the latter part of the 19th century. Moving east of the Rockies, Wu argues that race and worker agency—as Chinese workers refused to fit into neatly ascribed stereotypes of docility and subservience—led to the decline of the Chinese labor experiment in the Northeast. This is an outstanding essay that demonstrates a masterful use of primary sources, an impressive engagement with the secondary literature, and prose that is clear and sharp.