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.