The King V. Hostick Award

King V. Hostick Scholarship

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum and the Illinois State Historical Society are accepting applications for the annual King V. Hostick Research Scholarships on Illinois History.

The Hostick Scholarship was established by the late manuscript dealer King V. Hostick to provide financial assistance to graduate students in the study of history and library science who are writing dissertations dealing with some aspect of Illinois history. Preference may be given to research conducted at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library), but all Illinois libraries and repositories of historic documents and materials will be considered. Stipends are individually determined up to $5,000.

All applications must be received by March 31, 2024.

For further information contact:

Attn: William Furry
Illinois State Historical Society
5255 Shepherd Road
Springfield, Illinois 62704-5408
Telephone: (217) 525-2781
E-mail: ExecutiveDirector@HistoryIllinois.org


King V. Hostick Scholarship Application Guidelines:

1. The applicant must be enrolled in a recognized graduate history or library science degree program in an accredited institution. Applications from other disciplines will be considered at the discretion of the award committee.

2. The subject of the dissertation must be directly related to Illinois history and must be approved by the graduate committee of the institution. Preference may be given to applicants who require use of the collections at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library).

3. The applicant must provide the King V. Hostick Award Committee with: a certified academic transcript of graduate work; a letter of recommendation from the applicant’s dissertation director which also certifies that the applicant has been advanced in candidacy; a current vita; a four-to-six page description of the research topic, including methodology, where it stands in the historiography, a bibliography, and sources to be consulted during the award period; and two additional letters of recommendation from faculty members of the applicant’s committee who are familiar with the applicant’s work.

4. Stipends are individually determined based upon the applicant's research needs. A detailed budget proposal listing travel, lodging, photocopying, and specific collections to be examined at institutions during travel stay should be submitted. If electronic equipment is requested, it must be itemized.

5. The applicant agrees to deposit a copy of the completed dissertation in the collections of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library). Should the dissertation be published as a book, the applicant agrees to deposit a copy of the published book in the collections of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library).

Previous Scholarship Winners

2019 Lawrence Celani, University of Missouri, Columbia, "They Came Apart at the Seams: The Long History of the Illinois and Missouri Borderland"

2019 Meagan T. Frenzer, University of Florida, Gainesville, “Dancing in the Devil’s Playground: The Intersection of Labor, Morality, and Pleasure in Chicago’s Dance Halls, 1910-1930”

2019 Katherina King, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg, Germany, “African-American Women Writers and the WPA”

2019 Wayne Duerkes, Iowa State University of Science and Technology, Ames, “Market and Community Development in North Central Illinois, 1833-1852”

2018 Nicholas Kryczka, University of Chicago, “Selective Renewal: Education Markets and Urban Renaissance in Post-Civil Rights Chicago”

2018 William H. Adams, University of Kansas, “Daughters of Ida B. Wells: Black Women’s Activism from 1964-1987”

2018 Ruby Oram, Loyola University Chicago, “Useful for Life: Chicago Girls and the Making of Vocational Education, 1880-1930”

2018 Shannon N. Missick, State University of New York at Albany, “The Evolution of a Desert: A History of Food Access in Chicago, 1950-1999”

2018 John Matthew Corpolongo, University of Oklahoma, “Reform and Refuse: Race, Labor, and the Limitations of Reform in Chicago, 1850-1920”

2018 Wayne N. Duerkes, Iowa State University, “The Rise of Northern Illinois: Community and Market Development within the Antebellum Midwest”

2017 Hope Shannon, Loyola University Chicago, “Mobilizing the Past: Local History and Community Action in Metropolitan Chicago, 1960-1980”

2017 William Cliff, Florida State University, “Creating the Antebellum West: Illinois and the Formation of the Middle Border”

2017 Amy Zanoni, Rutgers University, “Poor Health: Retrenchment and Resistance in Chicago’s Public Hospital”

2017 Jon Marcos Reynolds, Northern Illinois University, “Systems of Indebtedness: Wage Garnishment and Its Effects on Minority Communities in Chicago, 1850-1969”

2016 Elizabeth Jean Stigler, University of Kansas, “Community Through the Kitchen: Tradition, Memory, and Citizenship in Chicago’s Czech American Community”

2016 Brady Winslow, Texas Christian University, “The Rise and Fall of Mormon Nauvoo, 1839-1846”

2016 Jon Marcos Reynolds, Northern Illinois University, “Systems of Indebtedness: Wage Garnishment and its Effects on Minority Communities in Chicago, 1950-1969”

2016 Joseph Otto, University of Oklahoma, “Plumbing the Prairies: Water Management in the Agricultural Midwest”

2016 Morgan Shahan, Johns Hopkins University, “Managing Deviancy: Parole, Probation, and Carceral Development, 1895-1939”

2016 David Tiedemann, University of London, “Britain and the United States at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1893”

2015 Rachel Boyle, Loyola University Chicago, “She Shot Him Dead: Criminal Women and the Struggle over Social Order in Chicago, 1870–1920”

2015 Christopher Ramsey, Loyola University Chicago, “Forgetting How to Hate: The Evolution of White Ethnic Responses to Racial Integration in Chicago, 1945–1987”

2015 Nora Krinitsky, University of Michigan, “The Politics of Crime Control: Race, Policing, and State Power in Modern America”

2015 Gerald Adam Rogers, Lehigh University, “Political Structure of Illinois Indians, 1700-1832”

2015 Sophie Elizabeth Cooper, University of Edinburgh, “Identify and Nationalism in the Irish Diaspora: Chicago and Melbourne, 1850-1890”

2015 Matthew Margis, Iowa State University, “Mobilization of the National Guard along the Mexican American Board, 1916-1917”

2015 Megan Klein, Loyala University Chicago, “The Irony of Integration: Race, Politics, and Spatial Disintegration of a Constructed Community”

2015 Kasey Henricks, Loyola University Chicago, “State Looteries: Historical Continuities, Rearticulations of Racism, and American Taxation”

2014 Christopher A. Schnell, St. Louis University, “The Lawyers’ Frontier: The Professionalization of the Bar and the Middle Class Family in Abraham Lincoln’s Midwest”

2013 Nicholas J. McCormick, University of Chicago, “The Changing Representation of Ecology, Evolution, and Science in Chicago's Natural History Museums, 1890-1940”

2012 Long Bao Bui, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “‘I Feel Impelled to Write’: Social Networking and the Culture of letter Writing During the Civil War”

2012 Rabia S. Belt, University of Michigan, “Disabling Democracy in America: Disability, Citizenship, Suffrage, and the Law, 1830-1920”

2012 Christine A. Croxall, University of Delaware, “Holy Waters: Lived Religion, Identity, and Loyalty along the Mississippi River, 1780-1830”

2012 Katie Sutrina, Northern Illinois University, “The Food Pyramid: Mexicans, Agribusiness, Governments, and Communities in the Midwest Migrant Stream”

2012 Sally Heinzel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Emancipation and Reconstruction in a Free State: The Racial Politics of Illinois, 1840-1890”

2012 Courtney Wiersema, University of Notre Dame, “All Consuming Nature: Human Ecology, Consumer Goods, and the Making of Industrial Chicago, 1833-1893”

2012 Jesse Nasta, Northwestern University, “In a State of Slavery, In a State of Freedom: African-American Migration and Legal Status on the Northwestern Frontier, 1803-1860”

2011 Jeremy Prichard, University of Kansas, “In Lincoln’s Shadow: Springfield during the Civil War”

2011 Sarah Bischoff, Rice University, “Lincoln’s South: Perception and Response”

2011 Karen Joy Johnson, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Christ in the Negro: Catholic Interracialism in Chicago, 1930-1968”

2011 D. Clinton Williams, Harvard University, “Righteous Politics in the Black Metropolis: Religion and Urban Space in Postwar Chicago”

2011 M. Scott Heerman, University of Maryland, “The Nations of this Continent: Slavery and Making the American Republic in the Mississippi Valley, 1730-1840”

2011 Steven Barleen, Northern Illinois University, “‘The Working Man Does not Need to Be Told How to Live’: The War on the Saloon and the Shaping of Working-Class Identities, 1870-1920”

2010 Thomas Dorrance, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Old Friends and New Deals: Reconfiguring Local Politics in 1930s Chicago and Los Angeles”

2010 Melissa Hayes, Northern Illinois University, “Litigating Intimacy: The Legal Culture of Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Illinois”

2010 Ryan W. Keating, Fordham University, “‘Give Us War in Our Time’: America’s Irish Communities in the Civil War Era”

2010 Patrick A. Pospisek, Purdue University, “Galena, Illinois: The Rise and Fall of Frontier Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820-1870”

2010 Barton Price, Florida State University, “Evangelical Periodicals and the Making of America’s Heartland in the Nineteenth Century”

2010 Alonzo M. Ward, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Before the Flood: African Americans and the Labor Movement in Illinois, 1865-1915”

2009 Shannon Smith Bennett, Indiana University, “A Different Civil War: Rioting in the Lower Midwest, 1860-1890”

2009 Mimi Cowan, Boston College, “Immigrants, Nativists, and the Making of Gilded Age Chicago”

2009 Daniel Peart, University College London, “Popular Engagement with Politics in the United States During the Early 1820s”

2009 Kerry L. Pimblott, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Soul Power: Black Power and African-American Christianity in Cairo, Illinois, 1967-1974”

2009 Felicity M. Turner, Duke University, “Narrating Infanticide: Constructing the Modern Gendered State in Nineteenth-Century America”

2008 Stephen A. Martin, University of Oklahoma, “Native Diaspora: Shawnee and Delaware Communities in the Mississippi Valley, 1779-1825”

2008 Matthew T. Popovich, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Boundaries of Progress: The Politics of Urban Annexation and the Anti-Annexation, 1870-1930”

2007 Megan Birk, Purdue University, “At the Mercy of the State: Rural Child Welfare Institutes, 1865-1910”

2007 Marc Dluger, Loyola University Chicago, “A Regimental Community: The Men of the 82nd Illinois Infantry Regiment Before, During, and After the American Civil War”

2007 Keith Erekson, Indiana University, “When People Do History: Indiana’s ‘Lincoln Inquiry’ and the Practice of History in America”

2007 Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “The Rise of a Punishing Logic: The Punitive Turn in American Social Policy, 1968-1980”

2007 Jason Kozlowski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Will Globalization Play in Peoria? Class, Race and Nation in the Global Economy, 1948-1998”

2007 Michael Rosenow, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Injuries to All: The Rituals of Dying and the Politics of Death among Workers, 1877-1924”

2007 Matthew Sherman, Saint Louis University, “Presidential Assassinations: The Failure to Protect Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley”

2007 David Spatz, University of Chicago, “Expressways and the Transformation of Metropolitan Chicago, 1939-1973”

2006 Thomas Bahde, University of Chicago, “Race and Justice in the Heartland: Three Nineteenth-Century Lives”

2006 Will Cooley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Holding the Line: Status, Race and the Middle Class on Chicago’s Southside, 1945-1983”

2006 Bryan Nicholson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “The Price of Americanism: Youth, U.S. Nationalism, and the American Legion, 1935-1970”

2006 John Reda, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Joining the Union: Land, Race, and Sovereignty in the Illinois Country, 1763-1824”

2006 Joshua Salzmann, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Safe Harbor: Chicago’s Waterfront and the Political Economy of the Built Environment, 1877-1920”

2005 Rene Luis Alvarez, University of Pennsylvania, “Minority Education in the Urban Midwest: Mexican Immigrants and Mexican Americans in Chicago, 1920-1990”

2005 John A. Ayabe, Saint Louis University, “Evangelicals and the Antimission Crisis: A Study of Religious Identity in the Central Mississippi Valley, 1820-1840”

2005 Denise R. Johnson, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, “GI Jane Remembered: Central Illinois Women Who Served Their Country During World War II”

2005 Stacy Pratt McDermott, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “A Legal Conduit of Community Power: Grand and Petit Jury Service in Antebellum Midwest”

2005 Sarah Rose, University of Illinois at Chicago, “No Right to Be Idle: Work, Citizenship, and the Invention of Disability, 1880-1930”

2005 Anne Stephenson, University of Chicago, “Rebuilding Bungalows: Home Improvement and the Historic Chicago Bungalow Initiative”

2004 Kenya Davis-Hayes, Purdue University, “Lessons of Place: A Case Study on the Creation of Physical and Curricular Segregation, 1910-1920”

2004 Cheryl Hudson, Vanderbilt University, “Making the Modern Citizen: Political Culture in Chicago, 1890-1930”

2004 Dana Weiner, Northwestern University, “Racial Radicals, Principles Enacted: The Struggle Against Inequality, Prejudice, and Slavery, 1829-1870”

2003 Jennifer Harbour, University of Iowa, “Shining in the Shadow of Men and War: African-American Women’s “Philanthropy and Political Culture in Civil War Chicago and St. Louis, 1863-1870”

2003 Michael D. Innis-Jimenez, University of Iowa, “Persisting in the Shadow of Steel: Community Formation and Survival in Mexican South Chicago, 1919-1939”

2003 Christopher E. Jaffe, Northern Illinois University, “‘Us and Them’: The Changing Boundaries of Acceptance and Exclusion for Incoming Ethnic Religious, and Racial Groups in Rockford, Illinois, 1880-1945”

2003 Robert M. Morrissey, Yale University, “Bottomlands, Borderlands: Empire and Identity in the Eighteenth Century Illinois Country”

2003 Emily B. Zuckerman, Rutgers University at New Brunswick, “EEOC v. Sears”

2002 Sarah Boyle, State University of New York at Binghamton, “‘Creating a Union of the Union’: The Place of Regionalism in the Development of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1880-1900”

2002 Steve Burnett, Carnegie Mellon University, “‘Cheat You Fair’: Maxwell Street and Chicago’s Working Poor, 1912-1968”

2002 Linda Carlisle, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, “Elizabeth Packard and Boundaries of Gender, Religion and Sanity in Nineteenth Century America”

2002 Cheryl Ganz, University of Illinois at Chicago “A Century of Progress: The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair”

2002 Steve Hageman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “‘This is a Terrible Thing’: Race, Class, and Gender on Chicago’s Southwest Side, 1950-1970”

2002 Michael T.M. McCoyer, Northwestern University, “Mestizaje Meets the Color Line: Mexicans and Racial Formation in the Chicago-Calumet Region, 1917-1960”

2002 Caroline Rolland-Diamond, Universite De Paris 1 (The Sorbonne), “Student Activism in Chicago in the Vietnam War Era, 1965-1973”

2002 Michael Sherfy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Narrating Black Hawk: Constructing and Reconstructing a Native American Historical Subject, 1832-2002”

2001 Pamela L. Baker, University of Illinois at Chicago, “The National Road and the Promise of Improvement, 1802-1841”

2001 Susan Roth Breitzer, University of Iowa, “Class, Ethnicity, and Community: The Jewish Labor Movement of Chicago, 1886-1928”

2001 Lionel Kimble, Jr., University of Iowa, “Combating the City of Neighborhoods: Employment, Housing, and Civil Rights in Chicago, 1940-1955”

2001 Matthew R. Lindaman, University of Kansas, “Heimat in the Heartland: A Trans-Atlantic German Migration”

2001 Russell McClintock, Clark University, “Response to Secession: Northern Political Culture and the Crisis of the Union, 1860-1861”

2001 Paula J. Anders McNally, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, “Moral Education in One-Room Schools: Macoupin County as a Case Study, 1906-1940”

2001 Robert M. Owens, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison, the Hoosiers, and the Primacy of Indian Policy in the Early Republic”

2001 Jennifer L. Weber, Princeton University, “The Civil War and Northern Society”

2000 Rachael Bohlmann, University of Iowa, “Drunken Husbands, Drunken State: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s Remaking of American Families and Public Communities in Chicago, 1874-1933”

2000 Jeffrey A. Brune, University of Washington, “Agrarian Vestiges: Rural Migrants and the Rise of Chicago, 1871-1929”

2000 Jonathan S. Coit, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “The Discourse of Racial Violence: Race, Gender, Politics and Crime in Chicago, 1914-1923”

2000 Sean Harris, University of Illinois at Chicago, “From Moral Healing to Mental Hygiene: The Commitment, Institutionalization, and Aftercare of the Mentally Ill in Illinois from 1870-1930”

2000 Daniel J. Lerner, Michigan State University, “Visions of a Sporting City: ‘Shadowball’ and Black Chicago, 1890-1955”

2000 Alan G. Shackford, Indiana University, “The American Bottom, Crossroads of Early America”

2000 Peter J. Ufland, University of Illinois at Chicago, “The Politics of Race in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, 1864-1890”

1999 Mark A. Cyr, Washington University, “‘The Valley of Shadows’: Religion, Law and Politics in Antebellum Illinois”

1999 Andrew J. Diamond, University of Michigan, “Hoodlums, Rebels, and Vice Lords: Youth Gangs and the Politics of Race in Chicago, 1919-1973”

1999 Elizabeth Green, Northern Illinois University, “Unraveling a Pastime: Needlework and Needlework Literature, 1870-1910”

1999 Elisa Miller, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Education for What? Home Economics, Woman, and American Higher Education, 1890-1935”

1999 Timothy B. Neary, Loyola University Chicago, “Crossing Parochial Boundaries: African-Americans and Interracial Catholic Social Action in Chicago, 1919-1954”

1999 Oleta Prinsloo, University of Missouri-Columbia, “The Case of ‘the Dyed-in-the-Wool Abolitionists’ in Marion County, Missouri in the early 1840s: An Examination of a Slaveholding Community’s Response to Radical Abolitionism”

1999 Nicole Ranganath, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Wedding Women to Tradition: Marriage in the South Asian Diaspora 1965-1990”

1998 Brian S. Deason, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, “Eye of the Storm: A Political Biography of Senate Majority Leader Scott W. Lucas”

1998 Dawn Rae Flood, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Hard to Prove: Victims in Chicago Rape Trials, 1926-1966”

1998 D. Bradford Hunt, University of California at Berkeley, “What Went Wrong with Public Housing? Federal Policymaking and Local Implementation in Chicago, 1934-1980”

1998 Michael D. Jacobs, Marquette University, “Catholic Response to the Ku Klux Klan Incursion into the Midwest, 1921-1928”

1998 Charles Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State University, “The History of African Americans in East St. Louis, Illinois circa 1914-1945”

1998 John F. Lyons, University of Illinois at Chicago, “The Chicago Teachers Union and the Schools, 1937-1980”

1998 Lisa Gail Materson, University of California at Los Angeles, “African American Women’s Involvement in Electoral Politics, 1913-1936”

1998 Chandra M. Miller, Harvard University, “Motivations and Attitudes of Union and Confederate Soldiers in the Civil War”

1998 Stephen J. Provasnik, University of Chicago, “The Quest for Perfection: The Making of the School and the State, 1870-1920”

1998 Mark R. Wilson, University of Chicago, “The Business of Civil War and the Transformation of Political Economy: The Midwest and the Union, 1848-1877”

1997 Michael J. Bennett, St. Louis University, “Bluecoats Afloat: The Common Union Soldier of the American Civil War”

1997 Wallace Best, Northwestern University, “‘Passionately Human, No Less Divine’: Racial Ideology and Religious Culture in the Black Churches of Chicago, 1915-1955”

1997 Tracey A. Deutsch, University of Wisconsin at Madison, “The Politics of Mass Consumption: Gender, Retailing, and the State, 1920-1946”

1997 Rosemary Holz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “The Birth Control Clinic: Women, Planned Parenthood, and the Birth Control Manufacturing Industry, Illinois, 1930-1975”

1997 Lynnea Magnuson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “A Gendered Reading of Manifest Destiny”

1997 Doris Malkmus, University of Iowa, “Coeducation, Social Reconfiguration and the Settlement of Illinois”

1997 Wendy Plotkin, University of Illinois at Chicago, “Deeds of Mistrust: Race, Housing, and Restrictive Covenants in Chicago, 1900-1950”

1997 Mark Santow, University of Pennsylvania, “Saul Alinsky and the Crisis on American Democracy”

1997 Andrew B. Smith, University of California at Los Angeles, “Reels of Blood and Thunder: A History of the Chicago Western”

1997 Randi Jill Storch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Shades of Red: The Communist Party and Chicago’s Workers, 1928-1939”

1996 Bryon Andreasen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “‘As Good A Right to Pray’: Protestant Democrats on the Northern Civil War Home Front”

1996 Mara Dodge, University of Illinois at Chicago, “The Social Construction of Female Criminality: A History of Women’s Imprisonment in Illinois, 1860-1970”

1996 Suzanne Cooper Guasco, The College of William and Mary, “‘On the Alter of His Principles’: Edward Coles and the Crucible of Slavery”

1996 Caroline Waldron Merithew, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Prairie Immigrants: Class Formation, Racial Consciousness, and American Identity in the Illinois River Valley Coal Towns, 1894-1924”

1996 Rowena Olegario, Harvard University, “Credit and Society in Nineteenth-Century America

1996 Graham Peck, Northwestern University, “The Social and Cultural Origins of Sectional Politics: Illinois from Statehood to Civil War”

1996 Andrew C. Rieser, University of Wisconsin at Madison, “Origins of the Liberal Creed: Public Culture and Private Desire at Chautauqua, 1874-1919”

1996 Amada I. Seligman, Northwestern University, “Scaling Ghetto Walls: Race and Community on Chicago’s West Side, 1940-1970”


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