Lewis E. Atherton Prizes

The Lewis E. Atherton Prizes, named in honor of a former trustee and president of the Society and a longtime professor in the University of Missouri-Columbia Department of History, annually recognize an outstanding master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation on Missouri history or biography. Master’s thesis winners receive $500 and a certificate; doctoral dissertation winners receive $1,000 and a certificate. Departments of history nominate the theses and dissertations, and no more than two nominations for each prize can be made annually by a department. Nominees must have completed the master’s degree or the doctoral degree between July 1 of the preceding year and June 30 of the current year. The deadline for submission of nominations is June 30 of each year, and the winners are announced at the fall annual meeting.

Atherton Prize Recipients

2010

• Keona Ervin - “‘A Decent Living Out of Our Work’: Black Women’s Labor Activism in St. Louis, 1929-45” (PhD dissertation, Washington University)

2009

• Adam Arenson — “City of Manifest Destiny: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War, 1848-1877” (PhD dissertation, Yale University)
• Peter K. Johnson — “The Origins and Nature of Indian Slavery in Colonial St. Louis” (MA thesis, University of Central Missouri)

2008

• Ken Mueller — “Benton and the People: White Nationalism on the Jacksonian Frontier, 1782-1848” (PhD dissertation, St. Louis University)
• Benjamin Israel — “Putting Black in Blue: The Struggle to Put Uniformed African American Police Officers on the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department” (MA thesis, University of Missouri-St. Louis)

2007

• Amahia K. Mallea — “Rivers Running Through: An Urban Environmental History of the Kansas Cities and the Missouri River” (PhD dissertation, University of Missouri-Columbia)
• Joseph M. Beilein Jr. — “‘The Presence of These Families is the Cause of the Presence There of the Guerrillas’: The Influence of Little Dixie Households on the Civil War in Missouri” (MA thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia)

2006

• Michele Lansdown — “The Defeat of the 1914 Missouri Woman Suffrage Initiative” (MA thesis, Missouri State University, Springfield)

2005

• Diane Mutti Burke — “On Slavery’s Borders: Slavery and Slaveholding on Missouri’s Farms, 1821-1865” (PhD dissertation, Emory University)

2004

No nominations received

2003

• Lisa Guinn — “‘Building Useful Women’ from the Depths of Poverty: A Social History of the Girls’ Industrial Home and School in St. Louis, Missouri, 1853-1935” (PhD diss., Oklahoma State University)

2002

• Amahia Mallea — “Progressive Kansas City and the Missouri River” (MA thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia)

2001

• Jay H. Buckley — “William Clark: Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, 1813-1838” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

2000

• Petra DeWitt — “Fighting The Kaiser at Home: Anti-German Sentiment In Missouri During World War I” (MA thesis, Truman State University)

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Last updated March 31, 2011