Overview
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 1, 2023
The Samuel and Marion Merrill Graduate Student Travel Grants, supported by a bequest from the Merrill trust, are given annually to help sponsor the travel-related costs of graduate students who are confirmed as participants on the OAH Conference on American History program and who incur expenses traveling to the conference.
Throughout his 40-year career as a professor of history at the University of Maryland, Horace Samuel Merrill earned the high regard of colleagues and students as a committed teacher, productive scholar, and caring mentor. An outstanding American political historian of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era periods, with interests extending through the New Deal, Professor Merrill took particular delight in assisting the younger scholars he met while conducting manuscript research at the Library of Congress. With the assistance of Marion Galbraith Merrill, his wife and scholarly collaborator, Professor Merrill fostered and provided hospitality to several generations of younger historians, even beyond those who formally studied under his guidance. Many went on to their own productive and fulfilling careers with a deep appreciation of the Merrills for the intellectual and social sustenance that made a difference in the early years of their professional lives.
Five awards of $500 each may be awarded each year.
Graduate students who are PhD candidates and who are presenting a paper or serving as a commentator on a session or panel are eligible to apply. Priority will be given to dissertation-stage doctoral candidates with decreasing priority given to students based on the year of matriculation in their respective PhD programs.
Please email your paper title or panel title, with an abstract and a CV (indicating your anticipated year of completion of the PhD), and a paragraph describing why it is important for you to attend the conference (besides presenting your paper or serving as a commentator if you are doing so), as a PDF by 11:59 p.m. PST on November 1, 2023 to the Samuel and Marion Merrill Graduate Student Travel Grants Committee at [email protected].
David W. Blight, Yale University, OAH President-Elect (Committee Chair)
Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, Vice President
Marc Stein, San Francisco State University, Incoming Vice President
2023
Brice Bowrey, University of Maryland, College Park
Doris Brossard, Rutgers University
Jorden Pitt, Texas Christian University
Jiemin Tina Wei, Harvard University
Amy Wilson, New York University
2022
Justin A. Grossman, University of Rochester
Connor S. Kenaston, University of Virginia
Haleigh Marcello, University of California, Irvine
Michelle M. Martin, University of New Mexico
2021 No in-person meeting due to Covid-19
2020 OAH Annual Meeting cancelled due to COVID-19
Molly Brookfield, University of Michigan
Michaela Kleber, William & Mary
Juan Ignacio Mora, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Carolina Ortega, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sherri Sheu, University of Colorado Boulder
2019
Cassandra N. Berman, Brandeis University
Nancy E. Brown, Purdue University
Rohma A. Khan, University of Rochester
Caroline Lieffers, Yale University
Jennifer Monroe McCutchen, Texas Christian University
2018
Eddie Bonilla, Michigan State University
Jonathan Lande, Tougaloo College/Brown University
Jody Noll, Georgia State University
Nakia D. Parker, University of Texas at Austin
Sarah E. Patterson, Florida State University
2017
Lindsay M. Chervinsky, University of California, Davis
Amanda C. Demmer, University of New Hampshire
Jacob C. Jurss, Michigan State University
Harrouna Malgouri, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Hilary Miller, Penn State Harrisburg
2016
Aaron Bae, Arizona State University
Garrett Felber, University of Michigan
Max Flomen, University of California, Los Angeles
Rachel Gross, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Farina King, Arizona State University
2015
Gregory Ablavsky, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Delia Fernández, Ohio State University
Amanda Hughett, Duke University
William S. Kiser, Arizona State University
Claire H. Rydell, Stanford University
2014
Brian Cuddy, Cornell University
Zackary W. Gardner, Georgetown University
Adam Goodman, University of Pennsylvania
Cecilia Márquez, University of Virginia
Ronit Y. Stahl, University of Michigan
2013
Aston Gonzalez, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
Allison Fredette, University of Florida
Celeste Day Moore, University of Virginia
Horace Samuel & Marion Galbraith Merrill Travel Grants in Twentieth-Century American Political History Committee
The Horace Samuel & Marion Galbraith Merrill Travel Grants in Twentieth-Century American Political History were inaugurated in 1998 to promote access of younger [i.e., relatively new to the profession] scholars to the Washington, DC, region’s rich primary source collections in late-nineteenth-and twentieth-century American political history. The program offered stipends to underwrite travel and lodging expenses for members of the Organization of American Historians working toward completion of a dissertation or first book.
2005
Caitlin Love Crowell, Yale University, “Love Stories: The Intimate Lives of African-American Women Activists, 1880-1950.”
Theresa Runstedtler, Yale University, “Journeymen: Boxing and the Popular Politics of Race, Nation, and Empire.”
Lindsay M. Silver, Brandeis University, “‘The Nation’s Neighborhood:’ The People, Power and Politics of Capitol Hill Since the Civil War.”
Emily Zuckerman, Rutgers University, “Beyond Dispute: EEOC v. Sears and the Politics of Affirmative Action, Gender, and Class, 1968-1986.”
2004
Jacqueline Castledine, Rutgers University, “`The Fashion is Politics’: Women’s Activism in the 1948 Progressive Party”
Alyosha Goldstein, New York University, “Civic Poverty: An Empire for Liberty through Community Action”
Daniel Link, New York University, “Containment Politics: Liberal Anticommunism in Cold War New York, 1944-1960”
James Patrick McGowan, University of California at Davis, “Too Brave to Fight: American Conscientious Objectors and the War for Democracy, 1917-1920”
2003
Thomas B. Robertson, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “The Population Bomb: Population Growth, Environmental Politics, and Foreign Policy in the Twentieth-Century U.S.”
Ellen D. Wu, University of Chicago, “Yellow Perils, Yellow Power: Race, Class, and Asian American Citizenship, 1941-1975”
James Wolfinger, Northwestern University, “The Rise and Fall of the Roosevelt Coalition: Race, Labor, and Politics in Philadelphia, 1932-1955”
2002
Cathleen D. Cahill, University of Chicago, “The Indian Service: The State, Gender, and Labor in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1869-1928”
Sara M. Gregg, Columbia University, “From Farms to Forest: Federal Conservation and Resettlement Programs in the Blue Ridge and Green Mountains, 1924-1976”
Adriane D. Smith, Yale University, “All Things Sacred: African Americans and the First World War”
Ann Marie Woodward, University of Kansas, “Between Growth and Entitlement: Fiscal Conservatism, Postwar Tax Policy and the Politics of ‘Pay-As-You-Go’”
2001
Nancy A. Banks, Columbia University, “Workers Against Liberalism: The Struggle Over Affirmative Action in the New York City Building and Construction Trades, 1961-1976”
Margot Canaday, University of Minnesota, “Good Citizens and the Straight State: Citizenship and Sexuality in the United States, 1917-1952”
Daniel M. Cobb, University of Oklahoma, “Encountering an Indian War: Culture, Poverty, and the Politics of American Indian Participation in Community Action, 1964-1973”
Eric Fure-Slocum, University of Iowa, “The Challenge of the Working-Class City: Recasting Growth Politics and Liberalism in Milwaukee, 1937-1952”
Neil M. Maher, Federated History Department of Rutgers University, Newark-New Jersey Institute of Technology, “Planting More Than Trees: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement”
2000
Craig Kaplowitz, Middle Tennessee State University, “The Paradox of Ethnic Identity: The League of United Latin American Citizens and U.S. Federal Policy, 1942-1975”
Robert Saxe, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “World War II Veterans and the Creation of Consensus”
J. Douglas Smith, California Institute of Technology, “Saying No to Jim Crow: Samuel Wilbert Tucker and the Politics of White Supremacy in Alexandria, Virginia”
Minoa Uffelman, University of Mississippi, ” `rite thorny places to go thro’: Self Identities of Southern Farm Women, 1880-1930″
1999
Liette P. Gidlow, Bowling Green State University, “To Push the Pendulum: The Get-Out-the Vote Campaigns, Critical Theory, and the Future of Political History”
Andrew L. Johns, University of California–Santa Barbara, “Hawks, Doves and A Wise Old Owl: The Republican Party and the ‘Democrats’ War in Vietnam, 1960-1969”
Lisa G. Materson, University of California–Los Angeles, “Respectable Partisans: African American Women in Electoral Politics, 1870-1944”
Paul C. Milazzo, University of Virginia, “Legislating the Solution to Pollution: Congress and the Development of Federal Water Pollution Control Policy in the United States, 1945-1975”
R. Mark Phillips, Bowling Green State University, “Fueling the Fire: United States Political Asylum Policy Toward Central America”
1998
Edward O. Frantz, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Going Dixie: Republican Presidential Tours of the South, 1877-1912
Kent B. Germany, Tulane University, “New Orleans and the Great Society: Federal Policy and Local Change, 1964-1978”
Mark Santow, University of Pennsylvania, “An American Faith: Saul Alinsky and Urban Democracy, 1939-1972”