The Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize is awarded in odd-numbered years for the best book treating any aspect of United States history in the period 1865-1920 published during the two years preceding the year of the award. It must be the author’s first book. The prize is given in honor of Vincent P. DeSantis, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Notre Dame, a distinguished historian of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Winners of this prize are honored at the annual SHGAPE luncheon and will receive a certificate and an honorarium.
Information about submissions for the 2025 prize will be posted in late summer/early fall 2024.
PAST AWARDEES
2023 DeSantis Prize Winner
Cameron Blevins, Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West (Oxford University Press, 2021)
2021 DeSantis Prize Winner
Vincent DiGirolamo, Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019)
2021 Honorable Mention
Joshua Specht, Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019)
2019 DeSantis Prize Winner
Beth Lew Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018)
2019 Honorable Mention
Joanna Dyl, Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake (University of Washington, 2017)
2017 DeSantis Prize Winner
Megan Birk, Fostering the Farm: Child Placement in the Rural Midwest (University of Illinois Press, 2015)
2017 Honorable Mention
Benjamin Coates, Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2016)
2015 DeSantis Prize Winner
Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Harvard University Press, 2014)
2013 DeSantis Prize Winner
Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2011)
2011 DeSantis Prize Winner
David Sussman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press, 2009)
2009 DeSantis Prize Winner
David Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Harvard University Press, 2008)
2009 Honorable Mention
Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2007)
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