The Ralph D. Gray Article Prize is named for the founding editor of the Journal of the Early Republic. The prize is awarded annually for the best original article published in the previous volume of the JER, as determined by a committee selected by the editors of the journal.

2025

Meagan Wierda, “Statistics ‘in Relation to Themselves:’ African American Activists, the Census of 1840, and the Radical Potential of Quantification” (Winter 2025)

2024

Meg E. Roberts, “‘Capacity for Labor Work,’ and Disability in the Early Republic, 1791–1833” (Summer 2024)

2023

H. Reuben Neptune, “‘The Baby of Biological Race’: The Issue of Racial Science in Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black” (Summer 2023)

2022

Andrew Diemer, “The Business of the Road: William Still, the Vigilance Committee, and the Management of the Underground Railroad” (Spring 2022)

2021

Ann Marsh Daly, “‛Every Dollar Brought from the Earth’: Money, Slavery, and Southern Gold Mining” (Winter 2021)

2020

Emily J. Arendt, “‛Two Dollars a Day, And Roast Beef’: Whig Culinary Partisanship and the Election of 1840” (Spring 2020)

2019

Robert Murray, “Bodies in Motion: Liberian Settlers, Medicine, and Mobility in the Atlantic World” (Winter 2019)

2018

Michael Witgen, “Seeing Red: Race, Citizenship, and Indigeneity in the Old Northwest” (Winter 2018)

2017

Tyson Reeder, “Liberty with the Sword: Jamaican Maroons, Haitian Revolutionaries, and American Liberty” (spring 2017)

2016

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, “Etymology of Nigger: Resistance, Language and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North” (Summer 2016)

2015

Rebeccah Bechtold, “A Revolutionary Soundscape: Musical Reform and the Science of Sound in Early America, 1760-1840” (Fall 2015)

2014

Shane White, “Freedom’s First Con: African Americans and Changing Notes in Antebellum New York City” (Fall 2014)

2013

David Head, “Slave Smuggling by Foreign Privateers: The Illegal Slave Trade and the Geopolitics of the Early Republic” (Fall 2013)

2012

Ruth W. Herndon, “Poor Women and the Boston Almshouse in the Early Republic” (Fall 2012)

Older Ralph D. Gray Article Prize Winners

2011    Thomas Baker, “An Attack Well Directed”

2010    Matthew Rainbow Hale, “On Their Tiptoes”

2009    Caleb McDaniel, “Repealing Unions”

2008    Tamara Thornton, ”A Great Machine or a Beast of Prey?”

2007    Douglas Egerton, ”Slaves to the Marketplace”

2006    Timothy Roberts, “Revolutions Have Become the Cloddy Toy of the Multitudes”

2005    James Bratt, “Religious Anti-Revivalism in Antebellum America”

2004    Andrew Shankman, ”A New Thing on Earth”

2003    Christopher Grasso, “Skepticism and American Faith”

2002    Jonathan Sassi, “The First Party Competition…”

2001    David Gellman, “Race, the Public Sphere, and Abolition…”

2000    Catherine Kelley, “Well Bred Country People”

1999    David Waldstreicher and Stephen Grossbart, “Abraham Bishop’s Vocation…”

1998    Robert Cray, “Major John Andre and the Three Captors”

1997    Daniel Cohen, “The Respectability of Rebecca Reed”

1996    David Nord, “Religious Reading and Readers in Antebellum America”

1995    John Quist, “The Great Majority of Our Subscribers are Farmers”

1994    Paul Goodman, “The Manual Labor Movement and the Origins of Abolitionism”

JER Prize (renamed the Ralph D. Gray Prize in 1994)

1993    Marc Kruman, “The Second American Party System….”

1992    Alan Taylor, “From Fathers to Friends of the People”

1991    Michael Morrison, “Westward the Curse of Empire”

1990    Sandra Van Burkleo, “The Paws of Banks”

1989    John L. Larson, “A Bridge, a Dam, a River”

1989    Major Wilson, “Republicanism and the Idea of Party …”

1987    Jean Matthews, “Race, Sex, and the Dimensions of Liberty…”

1986    Daniel Preston, “Administration and Reform of the US Patent Office…”

1985    Richard McCormick, “Was There a Whig Strategy in 1836?”

1984    Norma Basch, “Equity vs. Equality”

1983    Mary Tachau, “The Whiskey Rebellion in Kentucky”

1982    Joseph Tregle, ”Andrew Jackson and the Continuing Battle of New Orleans”