Baruch Professor Wins DeSantis Prize for Best Book on Gilded Age and Progressive Era

April 28, 2021

Vincent DiGirolamo, PhD, an associate professor in Baruch’s Department of History at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded the prestigious 2021 Vincent P. DeSantis Prize for his first nonfiction book Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys.

The top prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) honors the best first book written on the period 1865 to 1920 published in the previous two years.

Published by Oxford University Press in 2019, Crying the News places newspaper hawkers—boys and girls—at the center of the upheavals of urban and industrial America, arguing that they were vital to the survival of poor families, the development of a free press, and the formation of enduring ideas about class, character, and capitalism.

According to an SHGAPE statement, Crying the News caught the award jury’s attention for the way “it manages to be a labor history and a history of capitalism, a history of childhood, an urban history, and a cultural history of the news industry all in one. It sensitively brings to light the experiences, struggles, and influence of a massive group of child laborers who walked the streets of our cities and towns, often unseen if rarely unheard, for more than a century.”

The book has garnered rave reviews across the country. The New England Quarterly praised Crying the News as “social history at its best.” Journalism History called it “monumental,” based on a “breathtaking array of primary sources,” and The Wall Street Journal declared that newsboys “now have their Boswell in Vincent DiGirolamo.”

The DeSantis Prize is the latest in a series of prestigious awards for Crying the News. The book last year won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians, the Philip Taft Book Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University, the Frank Luther Mott Research Award from the Kappa Tau Alpha National Journalism Honor Society, and the Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize from the American Historical Association. Dr. DiGirolamo also received a 2020 Baruch College Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Scholarship.

“Each award is special,” said DiGirolamo, “because it recognizes the capacity of these children to deepen our understanding of so many periods and themes in American history, including labor, childhood, commerce, journalism, philanthropy, city life, and social reform.

“It is especially gratifying,” he added, “to receive awards won by my idols and mentors. I came of age as a journalist and historian reading the works of previous winners, some of whom were my professors at Berkeley and Princeton. I’d like to believe that their influence rubbed off. I hope I can do as much teaching at Baruch.”

SHGAPE will honor DiGirolamo at a virtual event with the three prize committee judges on May 12, 2021, at 7pm. The Zoom discussion is open to the public, though prior registration is required.

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