The New York State Historical Association Awards

Dixon Ryan Fox Manuscript Prize

The NYSHA Editorial Board voted to award the 2004 Dixon Ryan Fox Manuscript Prize to Timothy J. Gilfoyle for his book, A Pickpocket’s Tale: George Appo and the Urban Underworlds of Nineteenth-Century America.

Through prodigious research, Gilfoyle has illuminated the life of an American who normally would have been consigned to anonymity but whose career provides an entrée into a complex mesh of urban underworlds centered on New York City, and extending across the nation and even into Canada. New Yorkers have long claimed that their metropolitan culture sets the standard for the nation as a whole, but Gilfoyle broadens that claim to include the criminal cultures of the nineteenth century, arguing that New York criminals led the way both in sophistication of their activity and in making a significant mark on the public imagination. He uses the lengthy prison autobiographical narratives of George Appo, a petty criminal, not only to examine the complexities of urban criminality, corruption, and vice, but also to probe the changing nature of masculinity and document the emergence of a distinct criminal ethic at odds with the moral code of reformers attempting to combat crime through rehabilitation. This form of manhood and ethic, distinctly tribal in nature, consisted of being "a good fellow" for whom loyalty to his comrades transcended the law, extending beyond the jailhouse door and even the grave. Gilfoyle shows that these concepts were held not only by criminals but also the political subcultures that enabled Tammany Hall, based as it was on the tribal affinities of immigrants at sea in an American society largely hostile to and contemptuous of them. Gilfoyle’s ability to craft out of Appo’s narratives a compelling story that grips its audience, while simultaneously subjecting his material to rigorous scrutiny for both historical and psychological accuracy, makes his book both a page turner and a thorough analyse de texte. The Pickpocket’s Tale is truly a tour de force.

Dr. Gilfoyle is a professor with the Department of History at Loyola University in Chicago.

The Fox Prize, with a purse of $3,000 is awarded annually to the best unpublished manuscript dealing with some aspect of the history of New York as a province or state.

The Kerr History Prize

The NYSHA Editorial Board has selected Karim Tiro of Xavier University in Cincinnati to receive the 2004 Kerr History Prize for "This dish very good": Reflections on an Eighteenth-Century Italian Ethnography of the Iroquois." Dr. Karim’s essay appeared in New York History in the Fall 2003 special issue on travelers in Iroquoia, guest edited by Dr Nancy Hagedorn of the State University of New York College at Fredonia. Tiro’s essay focuses on the 1790 travel journal of Milanese Count Paolo Andreani who visited several Six Nations communities and produced one of the more substantial accounts of any of the eastern Iroquois nations in the post-Revolutionary period. The article was cited not only for its recovery of an extremely valuable primary document, but also for its rich contextualization of the journal and for its trenchant discussion of the important role travelers’ accounts can play in the ongoing work of shaping a picture of Native history.

The Kerr History Prize was endowed by the Association’s late trustee and treasurer, Paul S. Kerr, to encourage and reward the study of New York History. With a purse of $1000, the award is given each to the best article published in the New York History ,the Association’s scholarly quarterly.