February 4, 2025
The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is pleased to announce our 2025 prize and grant winners. This page will be updated as additional results are announced. Visit our website for a full list of SHGAPE prizes and deadlines.
Prize winners are celebrated at our annual SHGAPE luncheon at OAH. We hope you can join us this year!
2025 Vincent P. DeSantis Prize Winner
The Vincent P. DeSantis Prize is awarded in odd-numbered years for the best book treating any aspect of United States history in the period 1865 to 1920. 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.
Matthew Gardner Kelly, Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023).
The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is thrilled to announce Matthew Gardner Kelly’s Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity as the winner of the 2025 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize. This book tackles a topic at the heart of American society: school funding. The now dominant model of paying for public schools through local taxes has resulted in massive disparities. As Kelly shows through a meticulously researched case study of California, the local school funding model and its racial inequities were not rooted in some timeless American tradition or the “natural” byproduct of abstract market forces. It was the result of specific and deliberate policy choices made during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Drawing on deep archival research and innovative spatial analysis, Kelly reveals how state and local officials in California systematically dismantled alternative funding mechanisms in favor of local taxation—a model that would become a national exemplar and entrench educational inequality for generations to come.
2025 Honorable Mention for the Vincent P. DeSantis Prize
Mary Bridges, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024).
The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era awards Honorable Mention for the Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize to Mary Bridges’ Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. This innovative book examines the “wobbly” and haphazard beginnings of American international finance during the Progressive Era. Bridges expertly weaves together the scales of both individuals and institutions, narrating the stories of twentieth-century bankers working in overseas bank branches alongside major structural developments like the Federal Reserve System. Through polished prose, Bridges charts how the infrastructural power of US global finance took shape in the early twentieth century.
2025 H. Wayne Morgan Prize Winner
The H. Wayne Morgan Prize is awarded in odd-numbered years for the best book published in the political history of the United States in the period 1865-1920s. The prize is given in honor of H. Wayne Morgan, who was the George Lynn Cross Research Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and a foundational historian of the Gilded Age.
Elizabeth Garner Masarik, The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2024).
The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is thrilled to announce Elizabeth Garner Masarik’s The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State as the winner of the 2025 H. Wayne Morgan Book Prize. This book returns squarely to the period of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era so as to trace in close detail the central role of women in the development of the radical reform agenda central to the creation of America’s modern social-welfare state. The book ranges widely from the study of sentimental fiction and social purity to racial uplift and the professionalization of social work so as to offer a comprehensive account of the many historical factors and forces playing a role in galvanizing women’s reform energies and transforming the nature of the modern American state. The book is beautifully written, archivally rich, and thoroughly rooted in the vast secondary literature concerning women, race, and reform in the period from 1865-1920s. It is an original contribution to the literature that will shape historians’ understandings of this pivotal historical moment for decades to come.
Cover image from the 2024 annual SHGAPE luncheon, courtesy Kimberly Hamlin.
Laura Crossley is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the SHGAPE Blog. She is a history PhD candidate at George Mason University, specializing in digital history and Indigenous histories. Her dissertation examines how political debates over land, statehood, and Native sovereignty in the American West played out at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.