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HOTCUS Updates
The 2026 HOTCUS ECA Article Prize was awarded to Jake Newberry for his article, “The Arizona Project: Phoenix, Unseemly Real Estate Speculation, and the Conservative Twentieth-Century West,” published by the Western Historical Quarterly in November 2025.
The panel decided that two other submissions were worthy of an honourable mention:
Mori Reithmayr, “The Invention of Gay Community in San Francisco, 1960–1970,” The Historical Journal (2025), 68, 857–877.
Lewis Defrates, “Neutrality by Absence: Overseas Americans at the Beginning of World War I”, Diplomatic History 49, no. 5 (2025): 637–64.
The winner of the 2026 HOTCUS Article Prize was Joe Merton, for his article “The Guardian Angels: Anticrime Activism and ‘Popular Neoliberalism’ in Crisis-era New York City”, Journal of Social History (2025).
The judges commented the article does an excellent job in taking the story of the Guardian Angels and showing how it speaks to larger political and economic issues in 1970s-80s NYC. The empirical research, clarity of writing, and engagement with secondary literature make it a true model of successful article writing.
The panel also judged Elsa Devienne’s article worthy of an honourable mention: “Making Plastics Count: Citizen Science Beach Cleanups and the Ocean Plastic Pollution Crisis (1980s–2020s)”, Environmental History (October 2025).
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Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS) exists to facilitate and promote scholarship in the field of twentieth century American history.
HOTCUS membership is open to scholars, students and teachers of twentieth century US history at all levels.
HOTCUS promotes the study of the twentieth century United States in four principal ways:
through an annual conference, which is intended to serve as a showcase for new research across the field of twentieth century American history;
through an annual winter symposium on a specific theme;
through HOTCUS panel presentations at major conferences;
and through the HOTCUS awards programme.