Undergraduate Student Features

2025 History Essay Prize Winners

Each year, the Department of History offers several monetary prizes for the best undergraduate essay in a number of categories. Please join us in congratulating our essay prize winners.

European History Prize

“From Conquest to Commercialization: Shifting between Gift-Giving and Commercial Exchange in the Roman Republic”

Avery Schollenberger

This paper examines the economies of the Late Roman Republic. Specifically, it focuses on the gift-giving economy that elite Roman men participated in and the ways in which the creation of the Roman denarius disrupted this exchange. The circulation of the denarius throughout the Mediterranean revolutionized commercial exchange, allowing all citizens to participate in trade without the need for the personal relationships previously required. However, this open access to trade created anxiety for elites. If coinage became the norm, the need for personal connections and therefore the higher position in society that elites held would become unnecessary or obsolete. This paper outlines the ways in which these anxieties manifested in elite writings both during the late republic and into the imperial period after as well as how these anxieties determined how elite men framed commercial exchange as a threat to traditional Roman values.

Rozelle Boyd Prize

“From ‘Mammy’ to ‘Tip Drill’: The Intersection of Racial and Gender Oppression in United States History through Images and Stereotypes”

Brayden Stalcup

This essay examines the oppressive stereotypes and images that have historically shaped the representation of Black women in American culture, including the “mammy,” the hypersexualized “jezebel,” and the domineering “sapphire.” I argue that these tropes were constructed as tools of racialized and gendered oppression to uphold a hierarchical power structure dominated by white men. Tracing these stereotypes across time, I show how some evolved—such as Aunt Jemima’s transformation from an Antebellum-era “mammy” to a more modernized figure in the late 20th century—while others, like the trope of “primitivity” that likened Black women to apes, persisted to justify colonialist narratives of Black inferiority. By analyzing how these stereotypes adapt across historical periods and political movements, this essay contributes to efforts to challenge them and advance gender and racial equality.

John W. Foster Prize

“‘The Glory of the Human Calling Under the Nuclear Cloud’: Christian Anti-Nuclear Protest During the Reagan Administration”

Adelaide Young Brust

This essay explores the history of American political protest and the relationship between Christianity and American politics through a study of the actions of prominent Catholic and Evangelical anti-nuclear groups who were active in the late 20th century. These pacifist activists practiced non-violent civil disobedience and used symbolic action, working within and outside their churches’ mainstream institutions to fight for the acceptance of radical pacifist theological interpretations. They faced excommunication and prison time, acting at a time when the Reagan administration relied heavily on Christian support to popularize its social and military policies. This essay discusses the ways church leaders, the government, the media, and the courts reacted to Reagan’s renewal of Cold War rhetoric and nuclear deterrence policies, and the subsequent protests these high-profile pacifist movements engaged in against them. The Catholic Plowshares and Evangelical Sojourners broke into nuclear missile testing grounds and production plants to pray, destroy machinery, and hold church services to protest against the use of taxpayer dollars used to fund war instead of social programs, creating a very different picture of Christian and 1980’s politics than the one we often remember today.

World History Prize

“The Deviant Body and Sovereignty: China’s 1935 Revised Criminal Code”

Rachel Waller

This paper examines the 1935 revisions made to China’s 1928 Criminal Code with focus on how the revisions strengthen state control over ill and deviant bodies. The 1935 revisions serve as an indicator of elite Chinese attitudes towards criminality and deviance, particularly their goal of hiding sick bodies from public view as an effort to maintain an image of national strength amid foreign colonial encroachment.

The sources analyzed sorted revisions into three categories: (1) Adaptation to the political and social conditions, (2) Adoption of new legal principles, and (3) Equality of sexes. Over the course of each section, the Chinese government harshened punishments and broadened state control over sick, addicted, and “immoral” citizens. These efforts emphasized the concealment and containment of undesired bodies to portray a powerful, clean image. In a larger context, these were seen as a necessity to uphold sovereignty among external imperial influence. However, China inadvertently mirrored Western governments with these revisions despite efforts to create distance.

William M. Locke Prize (Honorable Mention)

“Secession from the Secessionist Perspective”

James Hyde

Upon Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 presidential election, southern states promptly held secession conventions to determine whether secession would happen and what it would look like. Functioning as mirrors to the original constitutional conventions, secession conventions had delegates with their own thoughts, opinions, and arguments about secession. This paper analyzes the words of these delegates to provide a better understanding of secessionist arguments about their cause, particularly at a moment before the war, when Lost Cause mythology surrounding the purpose of secession had not yet been formed. Essentially, the secessionist argument was centrally motivated by slavery, particularly in three distinct contexts: slavery as a political power, slavery as an economic force, and slavery as a cultural stabilizer. With this in mind, an analysis of these conventions is not only illuminating, but it is also vital to set the context for the Civil War.