The Society: The Nathan Reingold Prize (Formerly Ida & Henry Schuman Prize)
The Nathan Reingold Prize (formerly known as the Ida and Henry Schuman Prize) was established in 1955 by Ida and Henry Schuman of New York City for an original graduate student essay on the history of science and its cultural influences. The Schumans supported the prize for many years, up to Ida Schuman's death in the 70's, after which the History of Science Society funded the award. In 2004, thanks to the efforts of the friends and family of Nathan Reingold, the prize was fully endowed and renamed the Nathan Reingold Prize.
The ideal Reingold Prize paper should be original; historiographically sophisticated; based on primary sources, either published or archival; clearly argued; well written; and interesting. Successful papers in the past have come from parts of dissertations in progress or revised seminar papers. The prize recognizes an original and unpublished article (articles that have been accepted for publication are ineligible) on the history of science and its cultural influences written by a graduate student enrolled at any college, university, or institute of technology. Essays in the history of medicine are not eligible for the prize; however, papers dealing with the relations between medicine and the non-medical sciences are welcome. It is hoped, but not assured, that the winning article will merit publication in Isis. Essays submitted for the competition must be thoroughly documented, written in English, must not exceed 8,000 words in length (exclusive of footnotes), and should conform to the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Please submit your electronic submissions (Word, rtf, or pdf documents) to prizes@hssonline.org.
Files should be no larger than 5 megabytes. Please use low resolution images. All information identifying the author by name or school should be removed from the document except for a coversheet that is separate from the body of the paper (essays are read without knowledge of the author's identity). If sending hard copies to the HSS office, send three copies of the essay with a detachable cover sheet.
Submit a Nomination for the Nathan Reingold Prize
Prize Committee Members:
- Georgina Montgomery, (chair) 2011-2013
- Alistair Sponsel, 2012-2014
- Rachel Mason Dentinger, 2013-2015
Past Winners of the Schuman Prize
1956 |
Chandler Fulton (Brown University), "Vinegar Flies, T. H. Morgan, and Columbia University: Some Fundamental Studies in Genetics" |
1957 |
No Award |
1958 |
Robert Wohl (Princeton University), "Buffon and his Project for a New Science" |
1959 |
No Award |
1960 |
H. L. Burstyn (Harvard University), "Galileo's Attempt to Prove That the Earth Moves" |
1961 |
Frederic L. Holmes (Harvard University), "Elementary Analysis and the Origins of Physiological Chemistry" |
1962 |
Robert H. Silliman (Princeton University), "William Thomson: Smoke Rings and Nineteenth-Century Atomism" |
1963 |
Roy MacLeod (St. Catherine's College, Cambridge), "Richard Owen and Evolutionism" |
1964 |
Jerry B. Cough (Cornell University), "Turgot, Lavoisier, and the Role of Heat in the Chemical Revolution" |
1965 |
Timothy O. Lipman (College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University), "Vitalism and Reductionism in Liebig's Physiological Thought" |
1966 |
Paul Forman (University of California, Berkeley), "The Doublet Riddle and Atomic Physics circa 1924" |
1967 |
Gerald Geison (Yale University), "The Physical Basis of Life: The Concept of Protoplasm 1835-1870" |
1968 |
Ronald S. Calinger (University of Chicago), "The Newtonian-Wolffian Controversy in St. Petersburg, 1725-1756" |
1969 |
Park Teter (Princeton University), "Bacon's Use of the History of Science for Scientific Revolution" |
1970 |
Daniel Siegel (Yale University), "Balfour Stewart and Gustav Kirchhoff: Two Independent Approaches to 'Kirchhoff's Radiation Law'" |
1971 |
Philip Kitcher (Princeton University), "Fluxions, Limits, and Infinite Littlenesse" |
1972 |
John E. Lesch (Princeton University), "George John Romanes and Physiological Selection: A Post-Darwinian Debate and its Consequences" |
1973 |
Robert M. Friedman (Johns Hopkins University), "The Methodology of Joseph Fourier and the Problematic of Analysis" |
1974 |
Philip F. Rehbock (Johns Hopkins University), "Huxley, Haeckel, and the Oceanographers: The Case of Bathybius haeckelii" |
1975 |
Lorraine J. Daston (Columbia University), "British Responses to Psycho-physiology" |
1976 |
Richard F. Hirsh (University of Wisconsin), "The Riddle of the Gaseous Nebulae: What Are They Made of?" |
1977 |
Thomas Jobe, M.D. (University of Chicago), "The Role of the Devil in Restoration Science: The Webster-Ward Witchcraft Debate" |
1978 |
Robert Scott Bernstein (Princeton University), "Pasteur's Cosmic Asymmetric Force: The Public Image and the Private Mind" |
1979 |
Geoffrey V. Sutton (Princeton University), "Electric Medicine and Mesmerism: The Spirit of Systems in the Enlightenment" |
1980 |
Bruce J. Hunt (Johns Hopkins University), "Theory Invades Practice: The British Response to Hertz" |
1981 |
Larry Owens (Princeton University), "Pure and Sound Government: Laboratories, Lecture Halls, and Playing Fields in Nineteenth-Century American Science" |
1982 |
Richard Gillespie (University of Pennsylvania), "Aerostation and Adventurism: Ballooning in France and Britain, 1783-1786" |
1983 |
Alexander Jones (Brown University), "The Development and Transmission of 248-Day Schemes for Lunar Motion in Astronomy" |
1984 |
Pauline Carpenter Dear (Princeton University), "Richard Owen and the Invention of the Dinosaur" |
1985 |
Lynn Nyhart (University of Pennsylvania), "The Intellectual Geography of German Morphology, 1870-1900" |
1986 |
William Newman (Harvard University), "The Defense of Technology: Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages" |
1987 |
Marcos Cueto (Columbia University), "Excellence, Institutional |
1988 |
M. Susan Lindee (Cornell University), "Sexual Politics of a Textbook: The American Career of Jane Marcet'sConversations on Chemistry, 1806-1853" |
1989 |
Richard J. Sorrenson (Princeton University), "Making a Living out of Science: John Dolland and the Achromatic Lens" |
1990 |
Michael Aaron Dennis (Johns Hopkins University), "Reconstructing Technical Practice: The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Instrumentation Laboratory after World War II" |
1991 |
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (University of Pennsylvania), "The Social Event of the Season: Solar Eclipse Expeditions and 19th-century Scientific Culture" |
1992 |
Sungook Hong (University of Toronto), "Making a New Role for Scientist Engineer: John Ambrose Fleming (1849-1945) and the "Ferranti Effect"" |
1993 |
Paul Lucier (Princeton University), "Commercial Interest and Scientific Disinterestedness: Geological Consultants in Antebellum America" |
1994 |
James Strick (Princeton University), "Swimming against the Tide: Adrianus Pijper and the debate over Bacterial Flagella, 1946-1956" |
1995 |
Helen Rozwadowski (University of Pennsylvania), "Small World: Forging a Scientific Maritime Culture" |
1996 |
James Spiller (University of Wisconsin--Madison) "Re-Imagining Antarctica and the United States Antarctica Research Program: Enduring Representations of a Redemptive |
1997 |
No Award |
1998 |
Michael D. Gordin (Harvard University), "The Importation of Being Earnest" |
1999 |
James Endersby (Cambridge University), "Putting Plants in their Place" |
2000 |
No Award |
2001 |
Joshua Buhs (University of Pennsylvania), "The Fire Ant Wars: Nature and Science in the Pesticide Controversies of the Late Twentieth Century" |
2002 |
Matthew Stanley (Harvard University), "'An Expedition to Heal the Wounds and Desolation of War': British Astronomy, the Great War and the 1919 Eclipse." |
2003 |
Avner Ben-Zaken (UCLA), "Hebraist Motives, Pythagorean Itineraries and the Galilean Agendas of Naples: On the Margins of Text and Context" |
2004 |
Alistair Sponsel (Princeton University), "Fathoming the Depth of Charles Darwin's Theory of Coral Reef Formation: Humboldt, Hydrography, and Invertebrate Zoology" |
2005 |
No Award |
2006 |
Joy Rohde (University of Pennsylvania), "Gray Matters: Social Scientists, Military Patronage, and Disinterested Truth in the Cold War" |
2007 |
Hyung Wook Park (University of Minnesota), "`The Thin Rats Bury the Fat Rats': Animal Husbandry, Caloric Restriction, and the Making of a Cross-Disciplinary Research Project" |
2008 |
Laurel Brown (Columbia University), "The Transmission of Arabic Astronomy to Europe and East Africa" |
2009 |
Rachel N. Mason Dentinger (University of Minnesota), "Molecularizing Plant Compounds, Evolutionizing Insect-Plant Relationships: Gottfried S. Fraenkel and the physiological study of insect feeding in the 1950s" |
2010 |
Helen Anne Curry (Yale University),“Vernacular Experimental Gardens of the Twentieth Century” |
2011 |
James Bergman (Harvard University), “Fighting Chance: The Science of Probability and the Forecast Controversy Between the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory and the U.S. Signal Service, 1884–1890” |
2012 |
Rebecca S. Onion (University of Texas at Austin), "Thrills, Chills and Science: Home Laboratories and the Making of the American Boy, 1918-1941" |