Prize Descriptions
Albert Marion Elsberg Prize : Given by the College for a sophomore, junior, or senior who has demonstrated excellence in modern history.
Allen J Willen Memorial Prize: The prize is awarded to the Columbia College student who writes the best seminar paper on a contemporary American political problem.
Chanler Historical Prize: Given by the College for the best essay submitted by a senior on a topic dealing with the history of the American civil government.
Charles A. Beard Prize: Given by the Department for a senior thesis of distinction in any historical field or period.
Garrett Mattingly Prize: Given by the Department for a senior thesis of distinction in any historical field or period.
Herbert H. Lehman Prize: Given to a General Studies student with an outstanding record of accomplishment in history courses at Columbia. Preference given to those with substantial coursework in U.S. History.
Lily Prize: Given by the Department for the best senior thesis in history on a non-U.S. topic. Established by James P. Shenton in memory of his mother.
Undergraduate Education Committee Prize: The Undergraduate Education Committee Prize is given to a thesis of excellence written in any field of history.
2022 Winners
Charles A. Beard Prize
Isaac Daly – A National Response: Widening Conceptions of Conservatism in Great Britain during the 1790s
Garrett Mattingly Prize
Rose Aydin – Water and Wellness: Cholera in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire
Lily Prize
Tunshore Longe – No Justice, No Peace, No Education: An Exploration of the Nigerian Student Leader Contribution to the April 1978 Crisis
Herbert H. Lehman Prize
Claudia Wolff – ‘A Black Man in a White World’: The Duality of Jackie Robinson
Chanler Historical Prize (prize split)
Marco Balestri – The Fight to Read, Write, and Vote: The New York State Literacy Test, 1922-1965
Matthew Chagares – Offensive Capability and Potential Usage: The American Biological Warfare Program During World War II
Albert Marion Elsberg Prize (prize split)
Francesca Barasch – The Privilege of Freedom: Disparities in Arrest and Sentencing Practices in Edgefield, South Carolina, 1865-1867
Noah Percy – The Age of Consent and Its Discontents: French Intellectuals and the Reform of Sexual Violence Law, 1968–1982
Allen J Willen Memorial Prize
Samuel Needleman – Consolidating the Carceral City: The Planning of Rikers Island, 1884–1925
Undergraduate Education Committee Prize (Prize split)
Madeline Zakheim – ‘The Sights I Would Have Preferred to Have Left Behind in Dunkirk’: A Comparative Study of Wartime British Memorialization of Operation Dynamo
Departmental Honors 2022
Rose Aydin – Water and Wellness: Cholera in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire
Francesca Barasch – The Privilege of Freedom: Disparities in Arrest and Sentencing Practices in Edgefield, South Carolina, 1865-1867
Isaac Daly – A National Response: Widening Conceptions of Conservatism in Great Britain during the 1790s
Beatrix Geaghan-Breiner – A New World Order Imagined: the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment’s Invention of “Rogue States.
Tunshore Longe – No Justice, No Peace, No Education: An Exploration of the Nigerian Student Leader Contribution to the April 1978 Crisis
Elizabeth Love – Nothing but Necessity: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and the Epistolary Form during the Second World War.
Kathryn Mokrynski – Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” – A “Disneyfied” Representation of President Lincoln at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
Samuel Needleman – Consolidating the Carceral City: The Planning of Rikers Island, 1884–1925
Noah Percy – The Age of Consent and Its Discontents: French Intellectuals and the Reform of Sexual Violence Law, 1968–1982
Sami Raza – Reporting the Battle for Peace: The Press at the Washington Naval Conference, 1921-1922.
Beatrice Shlansky – ‘An Exercise of True Christian Stewardship’: Presbyterian Missionary Sheldon Jackson in Alaska (1877 – 1909).
Timmy Stabler – The Media Allies of the San Francisco Hippies, 1965-67.
Claudia Wolff – ‘A Black Man in a White World’: The Duality of Jackie Robinson.
2021 Winners
Charles A. Beard Prize
Nicholas Loud – “Death of a Trolley Conductor”: Urban Landscape, Social Mobility, and Cross-Class Coalition in the Brooklyn Trolley Strike of 1895
Garrett Mattingly Prize
Coleman Sherry – Corporate Heads: Phrenology, Physiognomy, and the Character of Big Business, 1895-1914
Lily Prize
Isabel von Stauffenberg – “Verraten und Verkauft”: The Contested Politics of Germany’s Treuhandanstalt
Herbert H. Lehman Prize
Yasemin Buharali – Re-imagining Education in the Early Turkish Republic: İsmail Hakkı Tonguç and His Transformative Educational Vision
Chanler Historical Prize (prize split)
Alex Hempel – Trichloroethylene Contamination of American Military Bases: An Alternative Toxic Waste History
Mary Marsh – Setting the Scene in Japanese America: Post–World War II Visions of Transnational Politics and Culture
Albert Marion Elsberg Prize (prize split)
Ramsay Eyre – Land Hunger in the Abolitionist Imagination, 1865-1872
Christopher Mingo – Hidden in Plain Sight: Italian Concentration Camps in Cyrenaica: 1930-1933
Allen J Willen Memorial Prize
Emile Warot – Dodging Antitrust: Nostalgia, Big Business, and the Baseball Monopoly
Undergraduate Education Committee Prize (Prize split)
Aisha Akoshile – An Age-Old Tug of War: Understanding the Intergenerational Conflicts of southern African Nationalist Groups
Departmental Honors 2021
Kayla Abrams – For the People?: The Role of Prosecutorial Misconduct in the Rise of Progressive Prosecution in Brooklyn, 1964-2019
Yasemin Buharali – Re-imagining Education in the Early Turkish Republic: İsmail Hakkı Tonguç and His Transformative Educational Vision
Jasleen Chaggar – Contesting Imperial Citizenship: The election of Dadabhai Naoroji as an MP in 1892
Emma Kateman – Capturing a Lifestyle: The Relationship Between the American Government and the American Film Industry 1945-1954
Zachary Kimmel – No Person Shall Be Deprived: Antislavery Due Process in New York State Courts, 1840-1860
Grace MacNeill – Reviving the Dead Letter: Attempts to Enforce Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment after the 1920 Presidential Election
Willem Morris – Copper Democracy: An International Labor History of The Anaconda Company: 1945-1960
Ari Papahronis – En Solidaridad: Nicaraguan Solidarity and Reagan-Era Radical HIV/AIDS Activism
Vinzent Wesselmann – Imported Deviance: Conformity, Halbstarke, and American Youth Culture in Postwar Germany
2020 Winners
Charles A. Beard Prize
Emmaline Bennett – Cities of Defeat: Spanish Civil War Refugees and the French Concentration Camps of 1939
Garrett Mattingly Prize
Lily Prize
Neil Hemani – Azad Hind: Radical Indian nationalism in Nazi Germany during World War Two
Herbert H. Lehman Prize
Mark Gyourko – “A Somewhat Awful Procedure”: Otmar Emminger, the West German Bundesbank, and the Final Days of Bretton Woods (1968-1973)
Chanler Historical Prize
Isabelle Harris – To Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: An Institutional History of Congress’s 1871 Investigation of Post-Civil War Violence
Albert Marion Elsberg Prize (prize split)
Jay Castro – ‘Rising Visions / Fragmentary Glimpses’: Framing Modernity in Madison Square, 1890-1920.
Paola Ripoll – “Looming A Little Larger Than Its Mere Geographical Size:” Puerto Rico in John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress
Allen J Willen Memorial Prize
Eitan Meisels – The Shah’s “Fatherly Eye” Iranian Espionage in the United States and the Anti-SAVAK Campaign (1970-1979)
Departmental Honors 2020
Emmaline Bennett – Cities of Defeat: Spanish Civil War Refugees and the French Concentration Camps of 1939
Eva Blake – Castle Pox: The Battle over Public Health in Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1773-74
Sunny Chen – “To Make World Culture Our Own:”The Russian Institute and the Development of Area Studies in Postwar U.S. (1940-1955)
Edgar Esparza – “[A] system which we wish to last for ages.”: An analysis of early American external and internal sovereignty, 1774-1790
Charlotte Force – Medicine and Religion in Irish Penitentials, 550-1215
Benjamin Goldstein – “A Legend Somewhat Larger Than Life:” Karl H. von Wiegand and the Fall of Hearstian Sensationalist Journalism
Mark Gyourko – “A Somewhat Awful Procedure”: Otmar Emminger, the West German Bundesbank, and the Final Days of Bretton Woods (1968-1973)
Isabelle Harris – To Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: An Institutional History of Congress’s 1871 Investigation of Post-Civil War Violence
Johanne Karizamimba – The Poetry of Revolution: Phillis Wheatley and the Transformation of Black Religious Thought
Alice McCrum – “The war, no, not that again”: Samuel Beckett, the French Resistance, and the Narratives of History
Sanjay Paul – Smallholders No More: The Populist Movement in Gillespie County, Texas, 1846-1896
John Russell – Abandoning the Crown: U.S.-Vatican Relations During the Vietnam War, 1963-1968
Manoela Saldanha – Smith, Snake, and the Struggle for Indigenous Religious Rights: Protecting Peyotism in Employment Div. v. Smith
Daniel Shao – Beethoven as “Paradigmatic Socialist Warrior”: The Reception and Performance of Classical Music in the GDR
Michelle Yan – “ Conciudadanas ”: The Book of Gold, Women, and Politics in Paraguay, 1864-1870
Perry Young – Immortal through Labor: The Stakhanovite Movement in Soviet Ideology
2019 Winners
Charles A. Beard Prize
Emma Kolchin – Reimagining Hayden White: The Politics of Writing History
Garrett Mattingly Prize
Yen Ba Vu – Dividing the Delta: Khmer-Vietnamese Relations from 1930 to 1954 in the Mekong Delta
Chanler Historical Prize (split)
Andrea Charlotte Floersheimer – Kitchen Courthouses and Flying Judges: Bush Justice in Alaska, 1959 – 1980
Emily Anne Gruber – ‘Knowledge, for what?’ Seth Low and the Governance of Brooklyn, Columbia University, and New York City (1881-1903)
Albert Marion Elsberg Prize (prize split)
Mahir Riaz – Sovereignty Ltd: Sir George Goldie and the Rise of the Royal Niger Company
Sylvia Davidovicz – ’A Prize for Warlike Ambition’: The 1885 Panama Crisis and the Rise of an American Power Complex
Herbert H. Lehman Prize
Yen Ba Vu – Dividing the Delta: Khmer-Vietnamese Relations from 1930 to 1954 in the Mekong Delta
Lily Prize
Sias Merkling – Olga’s Occult: Bézobrazow’s Formation of Spiritualist Feminism in the Revue des femmes russes during France’s Fin de Siècle
Departmental Honors 2019
Cregan, Luke DeCourcey
Cunliffe, Margaret
Davidovicz Smith, Sylvia Michael
Floersheimer, Andrea Charlotte
Gruber, Emily Anne
Magid, Rebecca Ona
Makarov, Erich
Merkling, Sias
Pedersen, Saskia Jane
Riaz, Mahir
Saha, Upasna
2018 Winners
Charles A. Beard Prize
Julien Reiman – ‘A Starving Man Helping Another Starving Man’: UNRRA, India, and the Genesis of Global Relief, 1943-1947
Garrett Mattingly Prize
James Woodall – From ‘Servant’ to ‘Hotel Worker’: Class Warfare, Hotel Workers, and Wobblies in New York City, 1893–1913
Chanler Historical Prize
Elizabeth Kandel – ‘Have we an American design?’: The Index of American Design and the United States’ Search for National Culture in the Great Depression
Albert Marion Elsberg Prize (split)
Edward Crouse – ‘Upheld by Force:’ Sylvia Pankhurst’s Sedition of 1920
Samuel Henick – Winter’s not yet gone: Construction and Memory of the Winter of Discontent in Popular and Scholarly Discourse
Herbert H. Lehman Prize
Benjamin Fortun – Unholy Gospel: The Radical Songs of The Industrial Workers of the World
Lily Prize
Arielle Alterwaite – Medical Imaginaries and the Emergence of Biopolitics on the Saint Domingue Plantation
Alan J. Willen Memorial Prize
Alexandra Fay – ‘Crimes of Government’: William Patterson, Civil Rights, and American Criminal Justice
Departmental Honors 2018
Benjamin Arenstein – Scripted History: Hebrew Romanization in Interwar British Mandate Palestine
Spencer Cohen – A Century of Naval Mythmaking in Tokyo: Remembering the Battle of the Sea of Japan, 1905-2005
Nathan Eckman – A Fleeting, Forgotten, Modus Vivendi: U.S. Foreign Policy and its Perspectives on Revolutionary Iran Before the Hostage Crisis of 1979
Dore Feith – Dueling Ideas of Honor and Anti-Dueling Networks: Moral Reform in Antebellum Charleston and Savannah
Kara Kupferberg – Resistance to Memory: The European Union and Memory of World War II Resistance
Henry Litwhiler – Crafting the Scholar’s Vocation: Health and Society in the Works of Marsilio Ficino
Benjamin Preneta – Neutrality Uncertain: Ghanaian Peacekeepers in the Congo Crisis
Rachel Sommers – Soviet Orientalism: A New Approach to Understanding Soviet-Middle Eastern Relations in the Interwar Period and Beyond
Emily Yeh – The People’s Institute: Working-Class Immigrant Political Participation, 1897–1917
2017 Winners
Departmental Honors 2017
Erik Dupire-Nelson – “Missed Opportunities on the Riviera: Strategic Decisions by the Western Allies in World War II and the Advent of the Cold War”
Daniel Echikson – “Sugar Traders, West Indian Slavers, and Corporate Financiers: The Economic History of an American Family at the Turn of the 19th Century”
Valerie Fendt – “Paradigm Shift: The Standing Rock Sioux and the Struggle of Our Time”
Peter Giraudo – “Divorced From Reality: Giovanni Gentile’s Idealist Political Thought and Fascist Concept of the Nation”
Aaron Hansen – “Pandering from the Pulpit: Religion and the Pursuit of Happiness in the American Republic, 1789-1825”
Danielle Jacobs – “The Investment Company Act of 1940: Democratizing Finance in the Fight Against Fascism”
Michael Crocitto Kenny – “‘A fool a fugitive or a hero’”: The European Odyssey of Herbert L. Matthews, 1931-1945”
Jeremy Reeves – “The Colonial Eye of Power and Personalized Politics in the Levant Campaign of 1941”
Martin Ridge – “The Romantic Consciousness: Marxism, Liberalism, and the Education of Marshall Berman, 1961-1970”
Brian Solender – “‘Farming Don’t Pay:’ The Anatomy of the 19th-Century Western Farm Mortgage Industry”
2016 Winners
Departmental Honors 2016
Maya Barad – “Developing Eugenic Consciousness: The Campaign for Voluntary Sterilization of the Mentally Deficient in Interwar Britain”
Conor Goetz – ‘The Mad and Hungry Dogs:’ The Press and Political Power in the Washington, DC Race Riot of 1919”
Maris Hubbard – “The Personal is the International: Building a Global Sisterhood in 1990s Belgrade”
Sam Preston – “The Nazi Atomic Bomb: The Mistaken Assumption that Started the Cold War”
Nicolas Sambor – “‘Celebrated, Criticized, and Copied Around the World’: The Harvard Economic Service and its Place in 20th Century Economic History”
Maxwell Schwartz – “The Progressive Democrats of the ‘New Era’: Private Citizens in American-Russian Relations, 1917-1921”
Patrick Sherrier – “The Power of Music and the Music of Power: ‘Nazi’ Musicians in America, 1945-1949”
Harrison Stetler – “‘A skilled surgeon presiding at the birth of a new culture’: Christopher Lasch on the Politics of Post-Industrial Society”
Ian Trueger – “Reading Difference in Inquisition Spain: Pork, Race, and the Specter of the Converso (1430-1527)”
Jingwei Xu – “‘Scientific Frontier:’ The North-West Frontier, Imperial Intelligence, and the Geopolitics of Empire, 1849-1901”
2015 Winners
Departmental Honors 2015
Dan Herbatschek
2014 Winners
Departmental Honors 2014
2013 Winners
Departmental Honors 2013
Lisa Cant
Benjamin Eckersley
Claire Sabel
James Wiseman
2012 Winners
Departmental Honors 2012
Noelle Bodick
Veronica Hylton
Karen Rios
Raul Alexandro Ruiz
Amirah Sequeira