Society for the History of Psychology

Division 26 of the American Psychological Association

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Best Journal Article
 
All papers published in History of Psychology during the previous year are automatically considered. The award consists of a certificate and an invitation to present an invited address at the APA Convention the following year. 
Articles are judged on the following general criteria: 
  • To what extent does the article add to the historiography of psychology? 
  • How well documented are the claims made in the article? How extensive is the research? 
  • To what extent does the article add to our understanding of historical processes? 
  • What does the article articulate about psychological science, praxis, or theory? 
  • Scope and potential influence of that work
  • Quality of the writing
The selection is made by a committee of three scholars appointed by the President of the Society. Each member serves for three years, with one member rotating off the committee each year. Normally, the person serving for the third year will chair the committee for that year. The committee begins deliberations in May for the volume ending the previous December and continues discussion until a consensus is reached on the winner of the award. If a member of the committee has authored an article in that volume of History of Psychology, she or he will be replaced by the Society President and will return to the committee the following year. 
The committee reports the winner to the Society President no later than August 1. The winner of the award for the volume ending in December is announced at the Society's Business Meeting at the APA Convention in August. The invited address for the winner would take place the following year. The name of the winner is publicized in the News & Notes section of the History of Psychology journal and on this website.

 
 
Best Journal Article in History of Psychology Awardees

 
 
2019 Renaud Evrard, Erika Annabelle Pratte and Erika Annabelle Pratte
Pierre Janet and the enchanted boundary of psychical research.


2018 David C. Devonis and Jessica Triggs
Prison break: Karl Menninger’s The Crime of Punishment and its reception in U.S. psychology.


2017 Michael E. Staub
The Other Side of the Brain: The Politics of Split-Brain Research in the 1970s-1980s


2016 Alan Costall and Paul Morris 
The 'Textbook Gibson': The Assimilation of Dissidence


2014 Tom McCarthy
Great Aspirations: The Postwar American College Counseling Center


2013 Wahbie Long
Rethinking Relevance: South African Psychology in Context


2012 Rachael Rosner
Aaron T. Beck's Drawings and the Psychoanalytic Origin Story of Cognitive Therapy


2011 Ben Harris
Arnold Gesell's progressive vision: Child hygiene, socialism, and eugenics


2009 Michael Sokal
James McKeen Cattell, Nicholas Butler, and academic freedom at Columbia University, 1902-1923


2008 Elizabeth Johnston & Ann Johnson
Searching for the second generation of American women psychologists


2007 Ann Rose
The discovery of southern childhoods: Psychology and the transformation of schooling in the Jim Crow south


2006 David Leary
G. Stanley Hall, A Man of Many Words: The Role of Reading, Speaking, and Writing in His Psychological Work


2005 Thomas Sturm & Mitchell Ash
Roles of Instruments in Psychological Research


2004 Alison Winter
Screening Selves: Sciences of memory and identity on film, 1930-1960


2002 Roderick Buchanan
On not "giving psychology away": The Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory and public controversy over testing in the 1960s


2001 Geoffrey Blowers
"To be a big shot or to be shot": Zing-Yang Kuo's other career


2000 John P. Jackson, Jr.
The triumph of the segregationists? A historiographical inquiry into psychology and the Brown litigation


1999 Cheryl A. Logan
The altered rationale for the choice of a standard animal in experimental psychology: Henry H. Donaldson, Adolf Meyer, and "the" albino rat


1998 Ian Nicholson
Gordon Allport, character, and the "culture of personality," 1897-1937

 
 
 
 
 
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