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 The prize recognizes an original and unpublished article (articles that have been accepted for publication are ineligible) on the history of science and its cultural influences written by a graduate student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. 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. Three copies of the essay with a detachable cover sheet (essays are read without knowledge of the authors' identity) are due at the Executive Office by 1 June. Electronic submissions sent as a Word or rtf attachment are acceptable (1 MB maximum)

2005 prize committee members:
Paul Lucier, 2004-2007 (Chair)
Alain Touwaide, 2005-2008
Marcos Cueto, 2006-2009

Joy Rohde (University of Pennsylvania), "Gray Matters: Social Scientists, Military Patronage, and Disinterested Truth in the Cold War"

 

 
Past Winners of the Schuman Prize
1956 Chandler Fulton (Brown University), "Vinegar Flies, T. H. Morgan, and Columbia University: Some Fundamental Studies in Genetics"
1958 Robert Wohl (Princeton University), "Buffon and his Project for a New Science"
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 Continuity, and Scientific Styles in the Periphery: Andean Biology in Peru"
1988 M. Susan Lindee (Cornell University), "Sexual Politics of a Textbook: The American Career of Jane Marcet's Conversations 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 Science"
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 Not awarded
2006 Joy Rohde (University of Pennsylvania), "Gray Matters: Social Scientists, Military Patronage, and Disinterested Truth in the Cold War"

This page last modified: 9 March, 2007